Michael Hickey tells Amanda Barber how his company navigated through the technology crisis and is now maintaining steady growth.

Finding the solutions to future problems sounds like a dream. MapInfo, a location intelligence company headquartered in Troy, NY, developed strategies to make that dream a reality. MapInfo improved its acquisition integration methods and streamlined its global sales process and this has positioned the company to better deliver location intelligence and predictive analytics to its customers globally.

Michael Hickey, COO of MapInfo, believes his company’s success lies in its critical analysis of the relationships between supply (assets) and demand (customers) and location. “Each customer we work with will have a different legacy and environment they’re dealing with,” said Hickey. “We have to customize around the edges because we typically can only deliver 80% of the solution out of the box.”

Core values
Location intelligence intertwines software, data and information, predictive analysis, and market vertical expertise with an organization’s assets by focusing on location. MapInfo uses these tools to help its customers change strategies and improve efficiencies in their businesses. In the past several years, MapInfo acquired four companies, two of which were in England and another in Australia. This growth enhanced the company’s mission to create a global footprint for delivering location intelligence, but it also posed a problem in creating a global company culture.

“When you acquire companies from different parts of the world, you’re also acquiring those regional cultures,” said Hickey. “Somehow you have to paint the picture of what the company is as a whole, and you have to do this early on. You shouldn’t acquire companies that don’t match your culture or if you do, you better be aware of the differences and how you are going to manage them.”

MapInfo uses its four core values when analyzing culture fit. The first is to maintain a customer-first mentality in all levels of your culture. Although this may sound obvious, Hickey said transitioning MapInfo in that direction took some work. “You have to change how you do business by constantly measuring how your customers think about you as well as holding your employees accountable and compensating appropriately,” he said.

The second core value is to maintain a sense of collaboration and teamwork. As a global organization with more than half of its employees outside of the US, MapInfo deals with the same types of problems large enterprise businesses do. Although regional leaders are expected to be decisive, allowing employees to participate in the decision-making process builds the trust necessary to act on and implement corporate philosophies and successful strategies.

Innovation, the third of the core values, applies to more than the technological aspects of what MapInfo does. Employees are expected to develop creative business models to inspire clients to view their businesses from a different angle. Through the acquisition process of the three international companies, a scientific process was used to determine whether new employees would fit the innovation value.

“We use a Web-based survey analysis to learn prospective employees’ personal beliefs on how they think things should be done,” said Hickey. “We ask generic questions that enable us to profile their strengths, weaknesses, and fit. We can overlay those results versus our core values and actually measure creative capacity in a quantifiable way.”

Prior to 2001, software companies had no need to adopt total quality principle models because so many in the industry were growing top lines at a 30% annual rate. After 2001, those companies stopped growing at double-digit rates and
started facing some of the same problems older industries experienced. MapInfo’s fourth core value, continuous improvement, analyzes a company’s productivity and efficiency in a
linear fashion.

“We take real-world problems and use those to train groups of employees on our total- quality-principle methodologies,” said Hickey. “We’re constantly reengineering our business processes and tying our improvements back to our customers.”

Selling success
As the company developed a larger global footprint, the need to develop a global company culture increased. MapInfo developed a global sales process to ensure each regional sales force worked the same way. Once the process was identified, the company implemented the PeopleSoft CRM system to give the sales team a 360-degree view of each customer.

The system allows employees to analyze each customer account, see every conversation the client has had with a MapInfo employee, what the customer purchased, and what business problems are still waiting to be solved. It also enables sales managers to keep closer tabs on what each sales person is and will be doing in the future.

“It’s similar to the integration process we use to do cultural analysis before we acquire a company,” said Hickey. “You know the problems before you go in. The same concept applies here; you’re seeing holes in the sales forecasting before they become issues.”

Since implementing the global sales process, many of MapInfo’s regional offices experienced improved organic growth. Both the Americas and the Asian-Pacific markets experienced
double-digit growth in the last fiscal year. In looking to the future, Hickey expects his company’s growth patterns to continue at the same pace.

“We are a $165 million company that wants to become a $300 million company by the end of 2009,” he said. “We are focused on delivering the same quality of service around the world that we deliver to our customers in our current geographies.”