Operations leaders working on back-office processes all over the world are racing to deliver value for their organizations, their customers, and the people working in operations itself. It’s a journey that ActiveOps has been proud to support countless organizations with, connecting people with insights to help them make the best decisions possible through our Decision Intelligence Platform.
As we gear up for the next phase of our own growth journey, we’re delighted that Paul Maguire has joined ActiveOps as our Global Managing Director. With 30 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul brings substantial experience growing enterprise software companies into market leaders. This is includes senior leadership positions at high-growth companies Appian, Genesys, Pegasystems and Tibco.
I sat down with Paul to get his thoughts on the state of enterprise operations, what the future holds, and his vision for ActiveOps and the future.
Bhavesh Vaghela: Hi Paul, and welcome to the ActiveOps blog! Let’s start with a bit of your background, in your own words. How have you got to this point in your career?
Paul Maguire: Thanks Bhavesh, it’s lovely to be here. So I actually started my career in software engineering, and since then I worked my way through project management, presales, sales, and finally into general management, where I’ve spent the last twenty years or so. I’ve been lucky to spend nearly my whole career scaling up high-growth enterprise software organizations, which themselves have been designed to help other companies boost performance.
Although it’s been some time since I was on the end of some code myself, I find that my technical and project management experience are a big help in leadership roles. Being able to understand how things get done, and the difference between approaches like Agile or Waterfall, enables me to make sure I’m asking the right questions of my teams and supporting them in the right way to meet the needs of our customer.
BV: I know that our people have already appreciated your approach and the understanding you bring to ActiveOps. You’ve been in role for three weeks now – what’s your perception of ActiveOps been like in that time?
PM: I have been aware of ActiveOps for some time, having met a few of our customers in the past. The talents of our customers, and their passion for ActiveOps, spoke volumes to me. Having joined ActiveOps, my first impressions are that we have outstanding people, a great culture, and a firm foundation for future growth.
The colleagues that I’ve met and spoken with so far have all been warm, generous with their time, supportive, and extremely capable. The culture that Richard and the leadership team have built is plainly designed to bring those qualities out and nurture them, which is brilliant. And we have a business with strong fundamentals. We’ve got a product that’s functionally incredibly rich, a very compelling proposition, and a lot of very happy customers – including some of the world’s biggest organizations, with the most complex challenges.
BV: I’m so pleased to hear you say that, especially about our people. What do you think makes the ActiveOps proposition so compelling?
PM: The need for sustainable high-impact change is pressing in almost every business and organization that I see and speak to these days. And automation is obviously, the way to deliver that change while keeping resources under control. But organizations have been automating for years now, and the returns have been getting smaller as we start to hit the ceiling of what automation can deliver. The missing ingredient, I believe, and the way to unlock more value from automation, is thoughtfulness and consideration. How do you make better decisions, more often, and faster?
That’s why ActiveOps is a world-class solution and I’m so excited to be a part of the journey. Decision Intelligence is that missing ingredient that will help organizations break through that ceiling of value they can get from their operations and automation activities. It enables everyone in the business to make the best decisions possible, all the time, by taking all the data present in an organization and feeding it into an AI that then delivers suggested courses of action to your people.
I like to think of it as scaling the quality and timeliness of decision-making – the levels of thought and consideration, if you will – beyond what your people could achieve purely by themselves, but without removing them from the process.
BV: And what do you think the future holds for ActiveOps and for the operations industry as a whole?
PM: I’m extremely excited about the transformational capabilities of ActiveOps. plain to me at this point is that ActiveOps works best as a platform layer that complements an organization’s existing technology investments, drawing data from myriad sources and combining it to deliver Decision Intelligence.
Over the years we’ve seen so many different systems and solutions that promise to revolutionize the world of ops management and cure all our problems; ActiveOps is, I think, one of the solutions that’s closest to living up to that promise, because it combines some really exciting AI-powered capabilities with a 20-year heritage in ops management. Lots of our customers have found that using ActiveOps, and the Active Operations Management methodology that sits under it has enabled them to professionalize their operations. They’ve created career pathways, new processes, and new ways of defining the value of ops to the wider business, all based on our solution.
From an ActiveOps perspective, I believe there’s big potential for growth – which is why I’m on board. I love nothing more than working with smart people to solve some of the most complex challenges faced by the world’s biggest organizations, using technology. Until now, the organizations I’ve worked with have dealt with work and processes; ActiveOps, by contrast, deals with people and resources. They’re two sides of the same coin, and any organization that can get them both right will find themselves on a fast track to success. I’m looking forward scaling up ActiveOps’ ability to support our customers as they strive for that success – to the opportunity to work on this similar, but different, side of optimizing operations.
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