DoGood Member Spotlight: Joe Letizia
"I was able to take what I learned at these larger companies and actually execute it here."
When Joe Letizia joined Armstrong International, the company ran seven separate ERP systems across sixteen businesses. Today it runs one. He's been there nearly twenty years. Here's what that kind of tenure makes possible.
Joe started as a developer in the mainframe days. When the operations team needed someone, he started helping on the side. Nobody asked him to. When their management role opened up, he grabbed it.
What followed was a decade of running global programs at United Technologies and Eaton, the kind of multi-year ERP consolidations and global rollouts most IT leaders only ever see from a distance. He delivered. But at the large companies, the ground kept shifting.
CIOs rotated every few years and reset everything. Strategies he believed in got whiteboarded and shelved. In his words, he was "a good lieutenant." He marched the orders, and then had to go back to his team and explain a new direction he didn't always agree with.
He wanted somewhere the strategy could actually hold. He found it at Armstrong International, a privately owned manufacturer, where he's run global IT for nearly two decades. The ideas that spent years on whiteboards were suddenly just things he could do.
I asked him what advice he had for those a few years behind him. He told me three things.
1. Consolidation is the lever.
Most IT leaders let their budgets scale with revenue. Joe treats that as a failure of strategy. At the big companies he worked at, fragmented systems were everywhere. One organization had accumulated 147 instances of their ERP globally because leadership kept changing and resetting direction.
"I was able to take what I learned at these larger companies and actually execute it here."
2. The price of a software subscription isn't the price.
The real cost is the months you spend configuring a new system while still paying for the old one. Most people accept that overlap as inevitable. Joe negotiates it out of the contract before he signs.
"When you buy software as a service now, ask for sixty days on the front end, because you're going to be running two systems at once while you stand the new one up. Make the three-year deal three years and two months. Same price. Free runway."
Joe Letizia, Armstrong InternationalIn hindsight it sounds obvious. Most people never ask for it.
3. Do the work nobody else wants.
Most people avoid the unglamorous stuff: the contracts, the budgets, the vendor calls nobody volunteers for. Joe sought it out. That's how you learn how the other side of the table actually works.
And once you know that, you negotiate differently.
This has been a DoGood Member Spotlight.
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