Meet the Buyer: City West Water’s Peter Hourihan

Peter Hourihan has held numerous senior IT roles in a career spanning nearly 30 years, including CIO for the food company Devondale Murray Goulburn. Now he holds the post of head of enterprise technology for the Melbourne-based utility City West Water, where he is overseeing the evolution of its enterprise architecture.

Tell us about a recent project that required an external IT provider.

When I was at Murray Goulburn, I worked on the implementation of SuccessFactors, the cloud-based HR information system from SAP. The systems integration partner was Presence of IT. It was a big deal for Murray Goulburn because it involved moving from traditional on-premise HR modules and migrating everything to the cloud, including the data.

What was their input?

Presence of IT were a true subject matter expert. They acted as an advocate for us.

What does a partner need to do to impress you?

You want to see experience, and you don’t want to see that you are going to be the first people that they experiment with. They need to know the product – particularly when you are looking at cloud-based systems. They have to both understand and have a track record with the integration challenge.

How do you assess one provider over another?

You’ve got to check that the people you are going to do business with honour their commitments and lead customers through the process. Going into some of these new capabilities, there is a leap of faith involved, and the selection of your partner is increasingly important. 

How is the cloud impacting the way you select partners?

Quite often you don’t have the ability to benchmark across providers. And when you do, the pricing is so widely different that it’s not really an indicator for you. So you start with the track record. You’ve got to make your mind up when you deal with partners and see whether they are actually scrambling to maintain their market share by saying they’ve got a cloud capability, or whether they have any experience in providing cloud solutions at all. Traditional partners are being challenged by new entrants, and the new entrants are predominantly dealing with the cloud-based options.

Is your use of external providers increasing or decreasing?

Keeping up with the technology means it is very difficult to build the intellectual property quickly enough within your own team, so we are increasingly looking to partners. I see a trend where IT functions are gradually moving away from building IT within their own teams to develop and configure and increasing their vendor management skills.