It’s a different world, and some vendors want to radically change the way they work with customers
EDGE: Where is your focus these days, is it more of a product sales or is it an account management focus?
MORETTI: I’m doing both. Underneath the people are getting specialized
and overarching that is the account director model. We have two dynamics going on which means our people can compete fiercely with the competition because they are experts. I didn’t have experts before, I had generalists.
EDGE: Most companies seem to lean to one or the other model
MORETTI: We’re trying to do both.We think it’s the way to go.
EDGE: This gets us to the area of customer care. Is that where you spend the bulk of your time?
MORETTI: Very much so. One of the things we have been doing is a customer first program by surveying ourselves by a third party. A couple of things have come out that we have addressed. Stop selling me tactically, stop being transactional with me, you’re solving little pains but you are not seeing my whole problem.
EDGE: Give an example, I know Toronto-Dominion Financial, one of your customers, is an example of doing business in a new way, the relationship is different.
MORETTI: It’s not just TD, it’s a number of our accounts. It’s getting better, we put more emphasis on being present inside the account, understanding what their pain is, saying you’ve got all these pieces in your enterprise, how do you get value out of what you already have? CIOs are challenged with saving money yet delivering better service, but how do you do that? We think we can help by not throwing more software at the problem, but going out and seeing what you have. Maybe you have this piece of CA technology you’ve been using it for 10 years, and the functionality has expanded. So rather than going out and buying more stuff, the solution may be in what you already own. They already have the pieces, we just have to glue them together.
EDGE: It sounds like at times you would be willing to forgo additional revenue or adding more software licenses, what is the rationale for doing that?
MORETTI: What’s in it for CA is a long-lasting relationship. I’ve built my creditibilty with the customer, their trust, that the next time they do something, they’ll think of CA first. That’s our motto — I want to be valuable today and esssential tomorrow. All things being equal, they are going to choose me because they have a better relationship.
EDGE: We’re hearing there’s too much software out there and too many companies. Are you seeing a trend to dealing with fewer vendors along with standardizing on fewer software platforms?
MORETTI: Absolutely. That’s one thing a lot of CIOs are talking about — “”These are my chosen vendors, I have this pot of money and I’ll spend it with them because I can trust them.”” CIOs want to deal with fewer vendors because managing too many vendors is a nightmare, and integrating the software among too many vendors is a nightmare. Having three, four or five strategic vendors is the way I’m seeing CIOs go.
EDGE: There’s some concern about software licensing practices in the industry. Are you looking at pricing alternatives?
MORETTI: Customers like flexiblity. I did a transaction, a pay-as-you-go type of thing with a customer in Calgary, and what they did was actually put the thing into production in a limited capacity. They paid as they went, and they quantified the value and the benefits so we were able to write a proper business case. We, as you know, are being business-cased to death. So, this CIO was able to get this much value, and three months later, he wanted to buy a license because he decided it would be more cost-effective while demonstrating enough value to the CFO and the CEO. Thousands of companies are now buying this way.
EDGE: What other things are you doing to help create value out of an IT investment?
MORETTI: Automating processes and creating self-service environments. I’ll give you an example inside CA. As a line-of-business leader, my biggest issue was with my IT group. We operate 1,700 servers and 40,000 desktops and laptops, so we are a significant IT organization ourself. My biggest problem was that I couldn’t get somebody started Day 1 — I hire a sales rep and the guy would be idle for two weeks waiting to be provisioned. That drove me nuts. We collectively said this had to change. Our CIO took Microsoft Exchange, PeopleSoft and e-Trust and integrated them. So when a person starts, we fill out the workflow process, define that person’s role in PeopleSoft, then propagate into e-Trust, and all the accesses that person needs to do that job are enabled. We’ve taken three disparate pieces of technology and integrated them. This is a self-serve system. One of the biggest problems that bank and insurance companies have is they are not exactly 100 per cent sure if somebody is terminated, that all those IDs are turned off. They tell me that all the time.
EDGE: The senior executive is taking a much larger role when it comes to IT. Does that mean you will be moving away from IT too?
MORETTI: IT is our customer and we are not going to go behind our customer’s backs. We just don’t do that. Whenever we talk to lines of businesses, we involve IT, or we ask IT, “”Can you sponsor us into this group?””
EDGE: Where is the CIO in all of this?
MORETTI: One of the biggest challenges for CIOs, and this isn’t new, is articulating the value of IT to the business. We have created a program called the Client Value Assessment, which says, ‘Here’s your spend and the value you are getting.’ This is after the fact — everybody has gotten good at writing the business case with an ROI calculation, but what about after it’s sold and in use for a couple of years? A CIO says, “”Well, I’m spending two million dollars a year and I don’t think that’s right. I think you should keep my costs down.”” If you quantify exactly how they are using our products, negotation becomes a moot point.
