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As we continue to speak to executives from all industries about how one should lead during these troubled times, Cory Eaves shared his views with Marc Gasperino. Here’s what he had to say:
As Chief Technology Officer, what impact does this have on Misys? How should we respond in the short-term and long term? My view is that Misys needs to:
1. Focus on customers. In these times of crisis, it’s easy to get caught up in the internal challenges of meeting budgets, reorganizing teams, and analyzing markets. It is exactly the wrong place to focus. Instead, focus on helping customers respond to their quickly changing priorities. As our customers merge, acquire, or restructure, they need our systems, our expertise, and our world-wide network of partners even more. They need us to be responsive, flexible, and understanding. It may be hard to think beyond the crisis at hand today, but when things stabilize again, customers will remember the companies that helped them through it.
2. Reprioritize. As markets change quickly, we need to reprioritize and implement quickly. We have set up focused, short-term teams to look at our product roadmaps over the six to twelve months to bring forward the specific features and projects our customers need. For example, providing improved risk analysis and management products have suddenly become much more important than some of the architectural changes we were developing. Being agile and bringing these specific products to market will have a real impact helping our customers through this difficult time.
3. Think long-term. While it may sound a bit at odds with my prior point, I think it is also important to not lose sight of the long term. Even as we reprioritize, and possibly delay some long-term investments we are making in our products, we should not forget that this will eventually pass. When it does, the global trends driving technology, such as open source, software as a service, and service-oriented architectures, will still be the same macro trends driving innovation in the software industry. Customers will expect progress on all these fronts, so investment in these areas is still important, even through these difficult times.
These are uncertain times in the both the healthcare and financial markets we serve. I believe these ideas will help us grow our business, stay close to customers, and retain our key employees as we weather the storm.
