Meet our Advisory Board: Interview with Dean Patterson of AAA
Describe for us what is your company involved with?
With our headquarters in Providence, R.I., AAA Southern New England provides a wide array of products and services to our 2.7 million members across a territory including Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Most people think of us as the company that saved them during their vehicle breakdown or the one that offers all the awesome ‘Show Your Card and Save’ discounts with their Membership. However, we also offer a suite of other products and services including; Travel, Insurance, Wireless, Financial Services (such as auto loans, mortgage and student lending) as well as Battery and Vehicle Windshield replacement. We are also our Members’ trusted advocate when it comes to issues involving the motoring public.
Your background?
A corporate level strategist and change agent with over fifteen years in information technology including the past 5 years in a Vice President role, six years managing technical professionals in advanced technology, telecommunications, systems programming and 4 years as an IT technical professional. My specific experience includes retail, manufacturing/production, consumer products and health care.
How large is your IT staff?
(31) FTE’s split into three segments; Applications, Telecommunications, Infrastructure/Help Desk & Security
Most significant business challenge that you face today?
An increased level of competitive threats to our business lines means that our technology solutions need to remain solid, easily scalable and be delivered in a timely manner.
Do you have key initiatives planned for this year? What are they?
Our most major initiative will be the replacement of our phone switch servicing our headquarters in Providence. With over 600 handsets deployed to our back office employees and nine call centers we easily receive 250,000 in-bound calls per month. In the case of Road Service there cannot be downtime at all. Once this replacement has been completed we will then focus on incorporating our remote Branch offices via SIP IP Trunking to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Are you using Microsoft Hyper-V? If no, any plans to do so?
We have tested Hyper-V but have not deployed it anywhere in production. It may have a fit down the road as we take a deeper dive into VDI for our various call centers.
Your thoughts on “The Cloud”?
There isn’t a day that goes by that my e-mail inbox doesn’t receive some sort of message regarding Cloud Computing and how it is the next-generation to the Information Technology industry. The reality, consumers who use Hotmail, Facebook and/or iTunes are already using an application form of Cloud Computing and don’t even know it. Meanwhile the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering has been a dream for web developers who need the ability to test and then scale their solutions in minutes instead of days. In my opinion Cloud Computing will gain its largest adoption in the mobile space for applications and services in the next three years. The main contributing factors; consumers love their mobile applications and continue to adopt feature phones that have smarter built-in web browsers.
The IT project that you are most proud of?
The successful launch of our Membership Relationship Management “MRM” custom software solution about 18 months ago. Our “MRM” solution enables our organization to provide specific and relevant offers individually tailored to each member. The 360 view component provides a snapshot of the products and services a Member utilizes, recent contacts and recent campaigns the member has received. The centralized Member profile allows a Member to obtain a quote in one branch and complete the purchase in another branch. This has really been a business enabler offering Club associates a complete picture when assisting a Member which allows them to present the right product at the right time in our goal to create a ‘Member For Life.’
If you had a magic wand that could do 3 IT tasks for you instantly what would they be?
- Reduce costs of high-speed data network connections (speeds greater than 100MB). Consumers are now able to receive extremely high speed bandwidth connections at home, oftentimes for $60.00 or less per month, to download high-definition movies, songs, gaming, etc. As a result service providers are requiring larger and faster pipes just to keep up with the amount of requests.
- Make a strong network security posture and set of policies a ‘hit’ with end-users. IT has always the bad guys when enabling a good security program -the more secure systems are the less user-friendly applications and passwords become to navigate and utilize.
- Require all telecommunication vendors to present their monthly recurring billing in a clear and concise manner making it easier for those processing bills to understand the line items they are being billed for versus the agreed upon rates in the contract (oftentimes signed more than 2 years prior).
Dean Patterson is Vice President of IT – AAA of Southern New England and a member of the VIB Advisory board.
