TECHNOLOGY
IT executive advanced career by advocating the client’s wishes

by Dena Sloan
For Virginia Business
August 2005

Donna Morea began her climb up the corporate ladder by asking a basic question: What did the client want?

Then a 26-year-old fresh out of business school, Morea was working on a project for the Department of Transportation for Washington, D.C. The chief engineer found the department’s computerized financial system awkward because it tracked expenses by individual line-items instead of by contracts. Morea recommended developing a more suitable system, and took charge of what turned out to be a new project for her employer, Fairfax-based American Management Systems, which she had joined just six months earlier.

By advocating for the client’s wishes, she got noticed and took the first step toward becoming a corporate executive.

“First and foremost you have to have the customer’s perspective,” says Morea, now president for CGI-AMS. The company is a subsidiary of Québec-based IT giant CGI, which provides network and software solutions to large clients in government, health care and financial services.

She’s come a long way from being a student of modest means at The Bronx High School of Science, a selective magnet school in New York City. After high school, she went on to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and studied photography while majoring in fine arts. “I have this belief that if you could merge your quantitative and analytical skills with your creativity and sort of nonlinear side, that marriage would be great,” she says.

After working two years as a studio photographer, Morea enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Following graduation, people suggested she work for a bank. But Morea preferred what she found at AMS: a place where people shared an intense sense of purpose and enjoyed collaborating with one other. She joined the company in 1980 — then an IT consulting firm with about 500 employees —believing it would give her the freedom to tap the skills of her hybrid background.

Charles Rossotti, a co-founder of AMS — who left the firm in 1997 after being appointed commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service — recalls that Morea “succeeded at everything she was given. … She went out and took on anything. She was, and remains now, one of the mainstay people that really made the company grow.”

When CGI, the fifth largest IT firm in North America, completed its purchase of AMS last year, Morea became president of CGI-AMS’s U.S. operations, with 7,500 employees in offices across the country.

Since then, she has been busy integrating the two companies. Yet, Morea stays active outside the office. She is a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Executive Women’s Alliance, an organization that promotes the advancement of women to executive positions.

Balancing a career and parenthood made her a better career woman and a better mother, Morea says. Staying in the work force gave her two children, now 21 and 17, a broader perspective on the world. They, in turn, have provided a healthy check on Morea’s career by reminding her of her imperfections, she says, like her inability to control every aspect of her life. Morea’s first child, her daughter, was born two weeks late. “I always felt like I could plan my life … perfectly until my daughter decided she didn’t even want to be born when she was supposed to be born,” she says with a laugh.