Rethink everything you know about managed IT services and the journey to get there

Learn about Circle K's journey to a managed services partnership with CGI

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Introduction: Circle K and CGI partnership

Vic: Hi, I’m Vic Iyer of CIO Marketing Services. Welcome to this webcast brought to you by CIO.com in partnership with CGI, featuring IDC analyst Daniel Saroff, who is Group Vice President for Consulting and Research. We’re going to look at creating an effective managed services relationship in IT. I'll do this by hearing about retailer Circle K and their journey with CGI.

CGI is a leading global provider of IT and business consulting services. Their end-to-end services include business and strategic IT consulting, systems integration and managed services, and IP-based solutions to accelerate value creation.

Shortly we’ll hear from Ed Dzadovsky, CTO at Circle K, and Joanna Robinson, Senior Vice President and Business Unit Leader at CGI. But first, Daniel Saroff will provide some context from and IDC perspective into the challenges that need to be addressed to have a successful outsourcing partnership. Looking forward to a really great discussion, and I’ll pass now to Daniel.

Challenges in Outsourcing Relationships

Daniel: Thank you very much, Vic, for that introduction. And I’d like to fit a little context before we go into the actual dialog between Ed and Joanna on the Circle K/CGI outsourcing.

Roughly 25% of outsourcing projects hit major hurdles in the first two years of the contract. Unfortunately, this number increases to almost 50% in five years when the projects outright fail or fail to meet key client requirements. These are obviously troubling statistics.

But they actually can be addressed by a mindful approach that starts with the creation of the relationship itself. And there are really eight areas that tend to cause the most challenges when we look at outsourcing contracts and engagements and relationships. They are underdefined strategic objectives, ambiguous requirements, poorly managed transitions, inflexibility to the changing needs of the business, communication gaps, cultural mismatch, and finally, misalignment between the party’s respective management structures.

In particular, we see these problems pronounced when the client is a first-time outsourcing partner. Today, we’ll discuss the proactive measures undertaken by Circle K and CGI to tackle and/or alleviate these challenges. Let’s now talk with Ed and Joanna on the Circle K journey.

Now the first thing I’d like to understand, Ed, is Circle K is really what we call a first generation in terms of their outsourcing experience. You’ve never done this before. This is a huge transition for your organization. When you started to consider outsourcing as a solution, what business challenges were you facing and how did you hope an MSP, managed service provider, could help you solve them? What was your vision for this, and how did you address the magnitude of this opportunity within your organization when looking for a partner?

Circle K partners with CGI to accelerate transformation

Ed: Thanks, Daniel. At Circle K, we like to say we’re making our customers’ lives a little bit easier every day. And so, we start with our store employees and our customers first. And for us, it’s about how do we improve speed-to-market to deliver capabilities for customers and employees?

How do we improve quality of services, and how do we have a better technology proposition for our stores? We didn’t approach this from an outsourcing standpoint. We really approached this from a, we want a strategic partner. This is a 10-year deal, and we were entering into something that was going to be long-term. We were really looking for somebody who could help us unlock capabilities that quite honestly, we’ve hit a wall with at Circle K.

So, bringing automation to life to deliver software in a much quicker way to enable digital transformation and some of the other things to enable our strategy.

Building a sustainable and successful partnership; the CGI Proof of Value approach

Daniel: Thank you, Ed. And Joanna, to follow onto that, I mean, Circle K, as we all agree, is a first-generation outsourcer. In regard to what Ed just outlined around speed to market, quality of service, ease for stores and customers, and cultural alignment, can you talk briefly about how CGI chose to approach this partnership with Circle K?

Joanna: Thank you, Daniel, and I think it’s somewhat unique maybe in the marketplace today. We engage in something that CGI calls a proof of value process, which is kind of a co-creation process. It’s like a trial balloon for a partnership.

It’s like six to eight weeks and it gives you the opportunity to get to know each other, understand what the challenges are, and truly shape and refine what the objectives are of a potential partnership. And in this case, many things that were just mentioned by Ed and you are related to speed to market, agility, optimizing and creating efficiencies, as well as truly launching more of an automation-type journey given some of the capacity constraints.

A lot of those things came to light during that proof of value process that allowed us to help shape a story together about what the future might look like, and then align resources, talent, individuals that were complementary to the culture of the organization.

Because as you mentioned in your opening statements, when you look at outsourcing relationships or MSP partnerships that work well, there is a strong relationship between the two organizations. And so, the proof of value process helps you curate that as a starting place, and also helps provide some context around information that you might not even know, especially for first-generation outsourcers.

They might not know all the requirements. They might not know how to define all those for a partner, and it helps minimize some of that risk in the future as well.

Prioritizing people and culture in transitioning to an MSP

Daniel: Thank you, Joanna. It really sounds like the proof of value was a key aspect that CGI and Circle K used to really marry the work culture and also really co-develop key processes and metrics. And you’ve outlined that in the culturally aligned perspective, but how does the proof of value or other aspects also help ensure successful talent support? And when I say successful talent support, it means, (1) with the retained talent that’s going to be on the Circle K side, how does that work? And for those folks in the Circle K organization who will now be working for CGI, how does that work, as well?

Joanna: Maybe I’ll start that off and then Ed can add in his thoughts. One of the things that Circle K had mentioned right from the beginning was just the care for employees. Circle K has such a strong culture around the employee experience and taking care of people.

And so, when we were embarking on this journey, we took a very empathetic and sensitive approach to making sure that we’re charting out career paths for people that might be coming over to CGI or transitioning from Circle K to CGI. CGI actually has a pretty strong core competency around people integration. More than 50% of our entire company have come through either partnership arrangements like this or mergers.

And so, CGI has a really strong core fundamental philosophy and framework around that, and it allows sort of an individualized experience for each person instead of feeling like you’re just a number somewhere. It creates an individualized experience as well as sort of harmonizing their transition into a new organization which might allow for new opportunities.

If you’re an IT professional and you’re in an organization whose core service is not necessarily IT, it provides a different level of career pathing inside of an IT-specific company. Ed, I don’t know if you want to share your thoughts on that.

Employee Integration and Career Growth in the Circle K-CGI Partnership

Ed: We talk about people, and we talk about culture: two very important things to us at Circle K. If you ask our CEO what keeps him up at night, he will tell you culture. Connection to our brand and affection for the Circle K logo are super important inside of this organization. If you ask an employee how long they’ve been at Circle K, it’s not a number. It’s a story.

They’ll tell you which acquisition they came in from. They’ll tell you how long they’ve been here. Our people are our most important asset. And as we embarked on this journey with CGI, we made it clear from the very beginning that we knew we were going to move some people to a new organization, but it was critically important that all of those people had an opportunity to pursue a career beyond Circle K.

From day one, in this conversation with CGI, together we were all clear that every single employee who wanted to pursue a career at CGI would have the opportunity to do that. And not only will they have an opportunity to pursue a career, but they have an opportunity now to grow from a tech standpoint that they don’t have at Circle K.

As an example, we don’t have a director of deployment inside the organization. But those types of roles exist at CGI. And so, people who move over into the organization have an opportunity now to work beyond the Circle K boundaries and pursue a career that we wouldn’t be able to give them inside of Circle K.

Joanna: I think it also will help, just to add onto that, I think it will also help that our global footprints are very similar. Circle K is very large. CGI is very large. The country overlaps were almost identical in many cases, and so it certainly helped that CGI is kind of a globally local presence if you will and has proximity in many different countries. I think that was also helpful as we were mapping out this journey.

The 'Proof of Value' Process: A Collaborative Approach to Accelerating Evaluation and Unlocking Partnership Potential

Daniel: And that sort of leads back to, it’s almost a step back question. You went through, as I think I’ve stated, a relatively unique process going through the proof of value process, whereas most people go through what we call a more traditional RFP process. I’d ask you, Ed, really, to start off, what made you folks think to go through a proof of value process more than the traditional RFP process? What drove you to believe that that would really be where the value proposition is?

Because, getting back to some of the issues I discussed earlier, often we see the RFP process is really where the mismatch is and expectations get formed. And so, I think it would be really important to understand how you chose or why you chose to go with a proof of value instead of an RFP, because I think it would really be educational to a lot of other people trying to understand the best way to really start with a good foundation for any outsourcing engagement.

Ed: The quick answer is speed and agility. You can spend a lot of time. You can burn a lot of months going through a very thorough RFP process. For us, this is our first time doing it. But the team that worked on this, it wasn’t their first time going through a process like this.

We were able to bring in some experts who had done work on previous RFPs with different companies. We brought in some subject matter experts. We had a great resource from EY, who quite honestly said, Ed, I spend more time undoing these deals these days than I do putting them together.

So, he had the right experience and a lot of proof points on why these deals often fail. We brought in the right people. We surrounded ourselves with a great team. This was still a competitive process, by the way. This wasn’t a proof of value that we did only with CGI. We had some checks and balances to make sure that we were getting a competitive process and competitive services here.

The proof of value was something for us that simplified the process, reduced the time it was going to take to do an evaluation, and really get to a deal that allowed us to unlock value sooner rather than later.

Daniel: Thank you, Ed. And Joanna, I know that a proof of value in our discussions really is, in some ways, a unique differentiator for CGI. I’d like to understand sort of why CGI has really focused on that model to a greater or lesser degree and what unique differentiators you believe it brings when working with clients and really setting up a sourcing partnership from the beginning to be successful.

Joanna: Maybe I’ll answer it a little bit more generically and then more specifically related to Circle K. I think at a broader level, it does give an opportunity to sort of take into account the intangibles of an organization that you might not always see in an RFP process.

Just some of the things we’ve already talked about like culture, the way the organization operates, etcetera. It allows you to take a little bit of a deeper view, especially for an organization who is very familiar with outsourcing and what works well and what doesn’t. It allows you to sort of see around the corner before it gets there.

I think generically it allows that next layer of context in capturing insights and recommendations for an organization, even if it may feel like it’s something that should be out of scope. It allows us to provide recommendations as well.

For Circle K, it gave us a chance to really get to know the organization, the leadership team, how they operate, the personalities of different people, and it gave me the opportunity to match leaders that I knew would work extremely well with the company and with the organization. And so, it allowed a little bit of a matchmaking process, if you will.

Building a “Dream Team” through talent matching

[Joanna continued] And if we go back to the founding principle that outsourcing and managed services relationships work best when you have a strong relationship, it allowed us to take that time to get to know Ed’s leadership team and match them with leaders on my team, and then that sort of creates this family dynamic.

And then when you’re faced with challenges, which everything in IT is going to face a problem at some point in time, you now have a fundamental family, if you will, that can argue and debate about something to get to the right solution for the company. I think that’s some of the secret sauce, if you will.

Ed: By the way, Joanna’s been the ultimate matchmaker. She told me when we started this process, “I’m going to build you a dream team,” and that really is a critical success factor and one of the key reasons why we’re doing so well with CGI. And she has built an incredible team for us, and the relationships that we formed with that leadership group will serve us well into the future.

Daniel: And that makes a lot of sense, because what we see is when there are challenges within outsourcing relationships, frequently they, unfortunately, devolve down into frankly people reading contracts and trying to interpret what the contract says and getting in a legalistic debate.

And it sounds like what you’ve done is you’ve sort of abstracted to a level of we know how each other works, we know how our respective organizations work, we understand each other’s expectations and relationships, and therefore, we want to avoid the point where we have to go into the contract and then have a debate about what the meaning of the word “is” is through this whole process.

And the POV really starts the process of creating that consensual relationship with mutual understanding versus the more traditional contractually based relationship which as we said, devolves, unfortunately, into legalistic interpretations or written documents.

Joanna: If I could just add onto that. In this process it allowed us to take the leaders that would be leading this program into the future and allow them to be in all those conversations. Where I think sometimes, in an RFP process, it limits individuals that can participate, and at some point in time, maybe there’s a handoff to different people.

It allowed us to ingrain those people into those conversations in the beginning so that two or three months down the road, three years down the road, they’ve had context throughout why decisions were made, why we decided to do this, why was it structured this way. It helps provide that context for why decisions were made, and how it was structured.

I think that also is an intangible thing that’s hard to define, but it certainly is a great benefit for the client and the experience and the objectives that we’re all trying to collectively drive.

How an MSP avoids the single source of institutional knowledge

Daniel: Makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Joanna. What I want to go back to is something that both of you touched on at various different points in the conversation so far, which is around IT talent itself. Which is, I think we all recognize, regardless of the economic conditions, it’s still tough to recruit IT talent, especially in areas like security, enterprise architecture, things of that nature.

Also, it can be a particular issue with IT organizations when you have what we call single-threaded resourcing where you have maybe one person in an organization who holds the institutional knowledge in that organization. And if anything happens to that person, like they win the lottery and decide to leave, it could really handicap an organization.

How can this relationship that we’re talking about between CGI and Circle K address the challenge of the single institutional knowledge holder, the single-threaded person, and can you take us through the impact on talent that this sort of relationship might have? I’d ask you, Ed, to start off because obviously, you know how your organization, Circle K, may be feeling that single-threaded nature within your organization. And then maybe Joanna, you follow up with really what, as a sourcing partner, you can do to help augment.

Ed: Great question. We think the unlock for talent here is huge. One of the services we moved over is level one helpdesk. The stores call to report an issue with the piece of their tech, and somebody takes that call and solves the problem. Our turnover in that group was anywhere from 20 to 30%, and on any given day we were short 20 to 30 helpdesk technicians.

We already see an improvement in moving that service over with the availability of talent that CGI can tap into, and the quality of those resources. We think the unlock is huge. The single threading piece has been a traditional problem that we faced inside the organization. We’re a flat organization. We run very lean. We’re very proud of that, but we have a few people that hold all the keys.

And I remember one of my directors saying, hey, when we move people to CGI, some people are going to quit, and then particularly called out a database administrator of financial systems in Europe. And they were really worried about it. And the answer that we gave back to her was this is exactly why we’re doing this deal, to eliminate these kinds of single points of failure.

And guess what? In these deals, not everybody loves the outcomes, and so that person did leave Circle K. They did not accept the offer with CGI. And what worked really well is CGI quickly plugged in three people to fill that gap. And we didn’t have a gap in our services or a slip in quality. We’re already seeing the benefits of what CGI can bring to the table.

Daniel: Makes sense. Joanna, can you elaborate on the benefits of the talent approach you use, and with some of the skillsets, also how you may upskill folks, etcetera. Also, could you touch on preserving institutional knowledge—because it’s not just the technical skills of your organization, but it’s the technical skills of your organization as it relates to Circle K and your understanding of Circle K’s unique business, cultural, and strategic attributes.

Joanna: Maybe I’ll start with that one. The process documentation that CGI goes through is pretty extensive, and we create a full operations framework that helps define processes and define knowledge. It also helps define where some of those potential risks are—where maybe there’s just a small portion of people with a certain knowledge base—and then allows us to develop workstreams to cross-train resources so that if someone is out, if someone leaves, etcetera, that we have the capacity for coverage.

That’s certainly a benefit to Circle K because of that capacity, again, because we’re an IT organization that has lots of resources, we’re able to sort of cross-pollinate capabilities and skills. And that documentation and operations framework is what will help protect that institutional knowledge moving forward. And that’s an artifact that the client receives.

Related to just the broader talent approach also, CGI has an award-winning learning platform that every one of our members has access to that can help them with certifications, help them learn new skills, and give them access to potential mentors around a specific field they might be interested in. It sort of unlocks potential for people who are joining our organization, transitioning into it, or newly hired, which creates a great curation of a learning culture. And I think that’s an important part to the broader talent approach as well.

Daniel: That makes a lot of sense, Joanna. And Ed, let me do a follow up on what Joanna just discussed for you. Similar to you, when I ran an IT organization, it was a very flat IT organization, and so there really wasn’t a career ladder for a lot of my technical staff. From your perspective, what does this relationship with CGI do for the talent at Circle K to maybe help them pursue different careers or grow their skillsets or provide them skill ladders?

A mindful approach to Circle K employees

Ed: We hope that we have two organizations where employees can move back and forth based on business needs, based on personal needs and desires. One of my team members came into my office one day and said, hey, what does a guy like me need to do to get in your chair? And he’s a manager of a deployment organization.

And I said, well, the path to get here doesn’t necessarily exist at Circle K. The path that you’re on today isn’t going to lead you there. But the path at CGI is going to give you opportunities to do a whole bunch of different things to grow in ways that we can’t provide.

I think we’ll see a lot of people with passion in their particular domain do some really incredible things inside of CGI, maybe with Circle K, maybe somewhere else. But as we said earlier, every one of the employees whose job was shifted has an opportunity to pursue a career at CGI. They may or may not work on our account, but they will be redistributed inside of CGI and it’s our hope that we can tap back into that talent if and when we need it.

For our retained organization, now their roles get to be a little bit different. They’re not managing the operations of tech anymore. They’ve become more strategic in nature. They become more of a partnership-type role with a great partner. It allows them to grow and do different things than they were traditionally exposed to on the operations side of tech.

Daniel: Let me ask one question on that because you said in many cases, they’re moving from a more technical role to really more of a relationship/strategic role, which can be a significant challenge for folks who came up the technical hot food chain, so to speak.

How are you handling helping those folks get a different set of skills and a different temperament that will allow them to better manage the relationship with CGI?

Ed: I will tell you it’s very much a work in progress. We’re still new in the relationship, and it’s been probably one of the earlier challenges. Not a bad challenge, but those people who are used to doing the day-to-day stuff, managing the operations, taking the frontline calls, are really working to figure out how the role is evolving, how they can be more strategic, and how they can leverage somebody else to get things done.

They still want to take the call, they still want to take that first line call, and they still want to solve the problems, and we’re working with them to figure out how do you actually hand those things off. It’s okay to go. There’s a whole team of people waiting to receive the issues. It’s a little bit of a struggle at the moment, but we’re starting to see the light on that. And I think people realize that we’ve got a trusted partner on the other side, and when we let go of those things, it’s going to get done. It’s a work in progress.

Daniel: Makes sense, but it sounds like you’re mindfully examining it and working through it rather than just letting it happen by accident. That’s actually a very important part of the whole process. It sounds like it’s a very mindful process overall looking at this.

Ed: It is, and I think a critical piece of that is actually defining what that new role is. We created job profiles for all of those members inside a retained organization to map out this is what your role evolved to, this is what will change, and this will be the expectations moving forward. Getting them to stick to that script now is the next piece.

Daniel: And that’s actually a great segue into my next thought as we’re having this conversation, which is around organizational structure, especially for the first-time participant in outsourcing, and really what needed to change from a retained organizational perspective in order to really successfully accommodate a managed service partnership.

The importance of change management

[Daniel continued] What are the key challenges? Can you talk about change management as a whole, taking an approach from a cultural organizational perspective?

Ed: I think this is actually critical to the success of this engagement. I always say change management is like a drug. You get a little bit of it, and you get addicted to it and you want more. And I will tell you it’s not something we were very good at at Circle K five years ago. And so we did change management on a part-time basis, and over the years we’ve realized how valuable this function is to the organization, and we’ve continued to invest in that.

So, I had an exceptional change manager who was a part of this engagement. She worked very closely with an equally exceptional change manager on the CGI side, and the two of them spent hundreds and hundreds of hours turning over every rock, considering every scenario, thinking about every employee conversation that had to happen, and then mapping out the milestones throughout this journey of where we had to have those critical conversations and what the tone of those conversations would be.

Do you get it 100% right? No, but we got it more right than we had misses. And I will tell you, this has become kind of the gold standard inside of Circle K now. My exceptional change manager has moved on from tech, and she is now building out a strategic change and transformation function for the company.

They’ve held her as the gold standard for what an engagement should look like. They promoted her, and now we’re going to distribute that across the Circle K organization, which is super cool.

Daniel: That’s interesting and I’m going to ask you your flipside of your perspective, Joanna, in a second, but what I really wanted to touch on is that exceptional change manager, the fact that she’s now doing it from a non-IT perspective for the organization as a whole, in some ways it gets back to what we’ve been talking about the whole time, which is you’re talking about relationship, you were talking about organization, you were talking about talent, and it happened to be wrapped around technology.

But the fact that you can now leverage this person out of the technology organization for Circle K as a whole, shows that the effort you’re going through building this relationship with CGI is creating the tools and the skillsets that could actually help from a business perspective, and ultimately, help drive Circle K to maybe transform what’s working and how it’s working from an overall perspective, not just a technology perspective, which I think is really sort of a fascinating positive unintended consequence of this whole process.

And with that, Joanna, I’ll flip it over to you. Ed’s given you sort of his perspective on the change management approach and how it’s worked, and I’d like to understand from you the methodology that CGI uses when they’re working on change management and organizational structure with diverse organizations, especially one that is really a first-time organization to experience it.

Joanna: In the early stages, we talked about this a lot because change management is like an iceberg. At the top of the surface, what people actually see is really important, and people react to it, but it’s all the things that happen below the surface that make it successful.

Being able to have, again, back to the proof of value process, being able to plan ahead of time so that we were taking careful consideration of every location, every person, the perception of messaging country by country as those are very different, and it allowed a lot of thought and care and empathy to go into the process.

I think that, again, going back to having the time to curate that sort of partnership in a collaborative way really helped foster an effective change management execution, in addition to some very talented individuals.

Daniel: Thank you, Joanna. I’ve seen both in our research and when I’ve done consulting with helping people outsource (and also marriage counseling when the outsourcing thing may have not gone well) a common promise from MSPs that they can assist in both cost reduction while at the same time helping drive innovation and modernization.

And frankly, these goals can often be in conflict. I’d like to start off with you, Ed. How are you aligning these goals in a convincing fashion? How are you balancing this? And I know you said earlier, Ed, that the primary goal was not really cost reductions, but obviously, you don’t want to see your costs expand significantly either.

How do you see the balance between costs, innovation, and modernization, or what I like to say, cost versus value proposition?

Cost vs. value

Ed: It’s a great question, and I think it’s an important one for anybody who’s embarking on this journey to consider. I’m really lucky that from the top down inside our organization, our board of directors, and our CEO never set out a mandate to reduce costs in this space. Certainly, there are cost savings, no doubt about it. We find some dollars there. But this really was about unlocking capabilities. We found that we were getting slower to market and slower to react to competitive pressures. We were doing things in a very, very manual way with limited automation, and our helpdesk turned out to be more of a brute-force ticket shop rather than a proactive monitoring organization.

The structure of this arrangement allows us to find some cost efficiencies and to reinvest those into automation to make sure that we can deliver on those things that are most important to the business: speed, quality and agility. I think too many times in an IT organization, you’re looked at as kind of a cost center.

And I think if you manage the costs, you start to get yourself into trouble. For us, really figuring out how we talk about the value of tech and flipping that narrative is where we’re trying to spend our time. We don’t talk about this ever as a cost-cutting exercise. We talk about it as a capability-enabling partnership.

Daniel: It sounds to me that if I were going to just do a very brief summary, you’re looking at it from a value perspective, not necessarily a cost perspective. And that value perspective is based on your investments; are you getting the outcomes you’d necessarily like?

How CGI brings innovation to Circle K

[Daniel continued] With that, Joanna, I’d like you to discuss the idea of innovation and modernization. Once again, when I work with other outsourcers, we always hear them talking about innovation, and frankly, we rarely see innovation coming to fruition. We often see it’s very operationally focused. I’d like to also understand really how CGI identifies and brings forward innovative ideas to the business or to the partnerships as they go forward.

Joanna: Thank you for the question, and it’s a really good one because I think, especially for our first-generation outsourcers, it’s a trap that you can easily fall into. The way that we structured this is we have the automation optimizations projects kind of dedicated people, dedicated resources, dedicated project managers, an alignment of technologies, tools, and recommendations that we already know will be complementary to the current environment for Circle K.

I think the dedication of some of those teams prevents what happens sometimes in outsourcing arrangements where it’s talked about but then it’s not necessarily executed. And then back to the conversation of devolving just to what the contract is about: “Oh, we’re hitting SLAs, we’re hitting KPIs, we don’t need to innovate.”

I think the way this was structured, with dedication to the objectives around automation and innovation, is a key attribute here. It’s maybe a lesson for others who are embarking on a new journey to think about it as its own entity. It’s incorporated into the overall program, but it’s important that it has its own milestones and objectives that are expected to come out of it.

Daniel: I’d like to bring something in. One aspect of innovation and using the most appropriate innovation is really understanding both the business environment and the business strategic environment of a partner. That way, you can understand what potential technology innovation can be useful.

And also, being able to explain what I call the art of the possible to the business side of the house so they can understand the potential that they may wish to invest in. How does CGI go about doing that?

Joanna: Industry expertise is an important aspect of this, and again, the dream team that’s been assembled for Ed and his leadership team. We really do have some outstanding talent when it comes to the world of retail: what’s happening and how do you potentially help, how can CGI help navigate some of the challenges that many retailers are faced with today around technology and some of the legacy systems that exist and the needs across, again, multiple countries.

I think industry expertise becomes really critical. Again, you’re talking about where the future is going and how we can be helpful in charting and mapping that path alongside you.

Daniel: What you’re really saying is you’ve got the horizontal expertise in the technologies, but you also make sure that you pair it within the customer and within your organization with vertical expertise within the respective industries.

Joanna: Exactly.

Closing thoughts: focusing on the business

Daniel: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Joanna and Ed. What closing thoughts would you leave the audience with? If they only took away these thoughts from the entire conversation, what would you want to leave them with, Joanna?

Joanna: I guess maybe just being open to the idea of looking at things differently and keeping, it sounds a little cliché, but keeping the end in mind related to the objectives that you’re trying to drive. And it may be a different path to get there than just a traditional process that our organizations are accustomed to going through.

And truly aligning those objectives to a partner that, again, back to the trust in the relationship, is needed for these to be successful long-term. My final thought would be having an open mind and maybe rethinking what’s possible.

Daniel: Thank you, Joanna. And Ed, final thoughts.

Ed: I think just a quick story. I did digital transformation in one of the largest recognizable global brands prior to Circle K. And so, when I joined the organization six years ago, it was with the promise of doing transformational type things in an industry I thought was one of the last to be touched by kind of the digital transformation arm.

I came here to do something truly different and unique. I didn’t come here to do cost optimization. I didn’t come here to do outsourcing. And to that point, it’s never been about either one of those things. It’s been about focusing on leading in the industry, leading another global brand through a transformation.

For us, the focus is really about the customer, the employee, and delivering new capabilities that make your experience inside of a convenience store different. Differentiated from our competitors. I’m proud to say six years later, we’re in the middle of that transformational journey. CGI will bring transformational capabilities to us, and I could not be more grateful to have a partner like CGI on this journey with me.

Daniel: Thank you. That’s a great summation. And thank you, Joanna, as well. And I will now pass it back to Vic for a few final words.

Vic: Thank you, Daniel. And that does indeed bring us to the end of this webcast brought to you by CIO.com in partnership with CGI on rethinking managed IT services. I also reiterate my thanks to our guests, Ed, Joanna, and of course, Daniel.