Meet the buyer: Stowe Australia

As the head of information technology at Australia’s leading privately owned electrical and communications contracting organisation, Karl Houseman provides IT support to more than 1,700 people in 16 offices around the nation.

Please tell us about a project involving an IT supplier.

We recently implemented a field service mobility solution to help schedule staff, track jobs and improve safety and reporting functions in our service business. While project management was done in-house, the project did require two software companies to collaborate extensively in order to deliver a successful outcome. Neither business had worked together before and I was pleased with their ability to put aside the tendencies to finger-point and just get on with it.

How does an IT provider impress you and win your business? 

Prove to me you understand our business. Prove to me you have the skills and experience within your business to really deliver what I want, without having to contract in necessary skill sets. Also, be prepared to be flexible. Not all businesses want to buy your end-to-end solution, so being able to pick and choose is sometimes very important.

Is it all about price?

The more value a project delivers to the business, the less it is about price. It’s about choosing the right solution and the right partner. Price is obviously a factor, but I’d rather try to find a way to fit the right solution into my budget than compromise the outcome by settling for anything less. But when it’s just a commodity, price is very important – I need to save those dollars for the value-add projects.

Can you tell us about the last time an IT service provider impressed you? 

It should happen often. If we surround ourselves with trusted partners who understand our requirements then we should be impressed. One of the partners in a recent project really bent over backwards to make their solution work. They customised their product and even their licensing model to fit with a particular and rather peculiar requirement we had. When a partner impresses like that, it bodes well for future projects.

What mistakes do IT service providers make?

Assuming all business in the same vertical experience the same challenges and drivers. Systems and process maturity can vastly affect technology drivers. The more IT service providers listen to prospective customers, no matter how similar they might seem to existing clients, the better the outcomes for both parties.

How is the cloud affecting your approach to IT investment?

Greatly. We have traditionally preferred to capex much of our technology spend to reduce the total cost of ownership over a number of years, but as more vendors and services move to cloud and subscription-based models it has meant we’ve had to shift our internal strategies. Greater reliance on cross-platform systems means we cannot capex some systems and sweat the asset for four years, when other dependent systems are cloud-based and constantly updated. To maintain version compatibility, we’ve had to move much of our expenditure to an opex model – and of course, that opens the door for putting many more workloads in the cloud.  

Resume

July 2008 – present Head of information technology, Stowe Australia

Feb 2001 – July 2008 Senior systems consultant/regional manager, Strategic IT

1996 – 2001  Systems consultant, Netbridge