Since joining the company in 1980, Morea has specialized in bringing to market strategic, enterprisewide solutions. In 1994, she founded the AMS Human Services practice, which delivered to more than 20 states breakthrough performance in child-support enforcement, child welfare, welfare reform and integrated case management,leading the group to a 40 percent annual sales growth rate. Building upon her successes, Morea led AMS in 2002 through a three-way merger, bringing together AMS' federal defense, federal civilian and state and local practices into one $600 million public-sector group. The internal merger has laid a foundation to leverage company experience, best practices and solutions to better serve all levels of AMS' government customers. The new group supports 375 state and local agencies; all major U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) agencies; nine out of every 10 of the federal civilian agencies; and more than 100 universities and schools. As a result of her accomplishments, she was elected in 2002 to the board and executive committee of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the premier membership association for the technology community in Northern Virginia. Morea earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, and received a BA in 1976 from Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.

VARBusiness recently sat down with Morea to discuss her goals and plans for the company. Here's her take on where the company has been and where it's going.

VB: You came into this position during a fascinating era,in the thick of the creation of a homeland security department. What are the biggest challenges?

Morea: It's a very exciting time to be in the government market. I use my kids as a barometer: For the first time in 18 years, they're actually interested in what I'm doing, because the government is at the forefront of what everybody is talking about.

But even before Sept. 11, there were transforming trends in government that were intriguing. As enabled by the Internet and Web technologies, the demand on government agencies to perform more efficient and effective service has never been greater. At all levels of government, there is an urgency to streamline processes, improve citizen services and improve access to information.

Citizens want the convenience of a virtual and transactional government. If you asked the average citizen where to get a driver's license, they don't care whether it comes from the federal, state or local government,or, for that matter, Amazon.com. What they care about is effective service. There has been, and continues to be, a major force out there to improve e-government services, and as a top [VAR], AMS is committed to this movement.

VB: What have been the most outstanding examples of this?

Morea: At the state and local levels, we created eVA, an integrated solution to address the Commonwealth of Virginia's vision for a statewide electronic procurement system. AMS brought this solution to market to allow businesses throughout Virginia to connect with various entities. Now, if a small business wants to find an opportunity within Virginia with, say, a [VAR], eVA enables this. This solution also serves city and county governments and educational institutions.

On the federal side, a powerful application we've developed is the Medicare.gov portal, which handles the needs of more than one million unique visitors. Again, as with the DMV example, if you ask citizens, "Who provides Medicare, the federal, state or local government or private industry?" they may not know or even care. What they do care about is getting access to Medicare information and services. The portal provides an easy-to-recognize, one-stop resource center to medical services. For example, visitors can compare nursing homes and Medicare health plans in their home states and counties, [and] identify providers and programs offering low-cost or free prescription drugs. Before the portal, all these activities were done much less efficiently, via pipe-stem style.

VB: Such examples are actually a result of Sept. 11.

Morea: Right. Sept. 11 has been a catalyst for the [VAR]. It brought to light the need for better government intercommunications. In the midst of this, all of us at AMS were convinced we could do a better job of serving customers' needs. And we could take applications that were successful elsewhere,even in the commercial sector,and apply them to the government customer. This is what led to the three-way merger of our operations to create the public-sector group. We also created a homeland security office. These moves allow us to reuse applications that were deployed in one area of government to another, such as ID verification, data mining and link analysis. Right now, ID verification is huge. Everybody is talking about it. One of the most troubling developments is people using fake documents to get valid IDs. We've pioneered solutions for quite some time in applications for commercial and financial customers. Now, post Sept. 11, we've been able to apply these applications to state DMVs and other federal agencies. [AMS declined to disclose these agencies' names.]

Now, with all of our public-sector resources combined at AMS, we see the public-sector market as a matrix as we address the demand for interconnectivity, streamlining processes and the President's management agenda. The first dimension of the matrix is organized around the agencies we serve. Today, a VAR has to not only understand the government in general, but also the agencies' individual missions. The solutions must be based on a business case, to improve the agencies' performance toward those missions. In the past, a [VAR] could provide widgets instead of solutions. But without helping the government customer meet performance goals, that won't work anymore. Because of this, I've assigned an executive to each government-customer account. He or she must live, eat and breathe for that government customer. [The executives must] put themselves in the customers' shoes.

VB: And you've brought some interesting hires to the table in that respect, people who aren't IT sales-channel lifers. What's the thinking there?

Morea: Our thinking is to hire AMS executives who have actually been in the government customer's shoes. For example, in October, Maj. Gen. Craig Bambrough joined our homeland-security practice to lead our initiatives in selling information-technology solutions. We've also hired Matt Dezee, formerly a member of the CIA's CIO staff, and most recently, CIO of the state of South Carolina, to help lead our office of digital government. These individuals know firsthand our customers' needs and goals. By hiring people from the field, we can more effectively serve our customers,you can expect to see more of this type of hiring from us.

VB: How does this translate into actual solutions provided?

Morea: Let's talk about the second dimension of the matrix, because it directly addresses that question: offerings. With a united public-sector group, we can leverage our offerings across all levels of government with effective, common methodologies and world-class solutions. With our financial-management tools, Momentum and Advantage 3.0, we serve 60 agencies with an auditable system to provide access to financial information. Similarly, a parallel system serves 150 state and local government customers within 20 states and eight of the top 10 cities. I saw the opportunity to bring all of this together, to create a leveraged effort and provide even better service to the customer.

An example of an AMS offering that can be leveraged across all levels of government is our suite of collections tools, known as the AMS Computer Assisted Collections System (CACS). Through this offering, we've enabled states to better collect what's owed, and, in the process, pay ourselves out of that additional revenue. That is what the industry refers to as a "benefits-funding partnership." So far, we've entered into these partnerships with five states, where we've generated nearly $1 billion. From this, we've been compensated $185 million, which means the states have received $800 million in revenue. In times of great economic crisis for states, believe me, the customer is grateful to have our tools to help boost their coffers.

Next, we plan to bring this type of agreement to the federal customer. After all, all agencies are in the business of collections. With all AMS public-sector units combined, we can be a better [VAR] than we were with three separate units.

VB: You also recently signed a $9.4 million contract with the state of Iowa to implement a Web-based government enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution with the AMS Advantage tool,better integrating the state's budget management. It's an integration project that will make the state more accountable and visible to the public in its processes and policies. In the post-Enron world, is it possible this is making a crossover demand in not only the commercial but the public-sector world as well?

Morea: Yes. It's important to the federal, state and local government customers, because they're all ultimately accountable to the citizen users. In the post-Enron world, it's not just "Where are my tax dollars going?," it's "How are those dollars being deployed?" Government executives want to make sure that tax dollars are being put to work in the interest of public service. Faced with this, our customers are opening up the books in ways they never had to think of before. I predict more of this is going to happen on the federal side. The President's management agenda has made this effort quite known, and agencies are even starting to compete with one another when it comes to providing greater public access and accountability.

VB: How have the government's pay-for-performance contract policies impacted VARs?

Morea: They've forced [VARs] to demonstrate that they have skin in the game. Many new pay-for-performance contracts have some or all of the compensation hinged upon true outcomes. That is new. It started with procurement reform in the mid-1990s. But the OMB has lit the fire recently, presenting government customers with a truly measurable business case that's served as a template. It's forced us to go through an end-to-end reengineering of what we do, to solve problems relating to everything from payroll and travel to grants.

VB: In turn, does it let the VAR get more government contracts?

Morea: Sure. But it's also separating the real [VAR] partners from the wannabes. With the Sept. 11 opportunity and the softness of the commercial-sector IT, we've seen a lot of new players wanting to sell to the government market. But the successful companies, like us, truly understand the government customer and have a proven track record of delivering results. The wannabes don't have this.

And with the government, size does matter. For instance, we recently launched Pegasus, a financial enterprisewide management system, for the U.S. General Services Administration [GSA]. Because it deals with the process of all federal agencies' transactions, some $16 billion of transactions are going through that system we've provided. That's bigger than McDonald's! In another example, the DoD chose us to standardize its procurement system. This endeavor has involved 150 sites and 24,000 users, with $36 billion in procurements processed. That's a pretty impressive distinction between [VARs] like us who will be strategic partners, and the wannabes who can't.

This also affects the way we engage in partnerships with market-leading software providers. Our vendor partners, such as webMethods and Siebel, are more concerned about selling solutions instead of commodities. That is in tune with our philosophy. We're moving from partnering with anyone for a transaction to establishing long-term partnerships to leverage our capabilities for the best customer result. Our approach is different from 10 years ago: You can't be agnostic about your partners anymore.

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