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In the U.S., both commerce and government call on Wright Express Corp (South Portland, ME) for payment processing and information management services for their fleets of vehicles. The company's success depends on offering sophisticated but easy-to-use Web and database tools to help its customers keep track of their expenses and manage their fleets.
Sally Emery helps provide that service. As senior manager of technical operations, she oversees fifty technical professionals who handle data management services, systems engineering, storage management, network support, data center operations, helpdesk and desktop services. Her team essentially manages the company's technical infrastructure and day-to-day computer operations.
Capturing fleet data
Wright Express collects information every time a customer's employee uses a corporate charge card to put gas in a fleet vehicle. The captured data is more or less what you see on your own personal credit card receipt, like amount of expenditure and names of driver and gas station, plus other info like vehicle ID number, odometer reading and type of fuel used.
Wright Express captures this data with proprietary software; customers use the information to manage their corporate fleet expenses.
"Right now we're in a growth mode," Emery says. "My team provides support for the development work being completed for the company. We are continually looking for cost-effective ways to simplify our systems software and hardware infrastructure."
Support plus new features
Emery's challenge is providing day-to-day support while developing new features and functions for the Wright Express technology portfolio. "It swings between the strategic and the tactical day-to-day operations," she says.
"For a company of our size, we're doing many exciting things. I'm learning every day."
She enjoys the technology she's working on, and also likes to help her team members develop their skills. "As a manager, I get my greatest satisfaction out of seeing people develop and take on additional challenges," Emery says.
"Falling into" a career
Emery entered the IT field in 1968, after getting her BA in math from the University of Maine-Orono. She took some programming classes and "fell into" a computer career almost casually, she says.
She grew up in a tiny town about twenty miles north of Portland, ME. Her mother was a home economics teacher and her father worked in forestry. Her brother is still farming the rich fields of southern Maine.
It never occurred to her that as a woman she would be a minority in the computing field and, in fact, she really never was. She attended a career fair in Portland and was hired by an insurance company that was ramping up its IT department. They sent Emery to IBM courses and trained her on the job. She worked for the company for thirty-two years.
"I started as an applications developer, and progressed through the programming ranks. Then I moved into the analytical world," she remembers. She was working on mainframe technology, but "You have much more power than that on your desktop now," she notes with a smile.
In 1991 Emery became the director of data resource management, focused on defining and organizing data across the enterprise. She then had the opportunity to manage the mainframe systems engineering group as well as the data center.
Directing facilities
She got out of computers for a while as director of the facility operation and planning department. "It involved everything from space planning to managing the physical infrastructure of fourteen office buildings," she says. "This area managed building electrical systems, heating and air conditioning, housekeeping, grounds, renovations and new construction and office space occupancy. I learned about a whole different set of technologies in this role."
In 1999 she returned to the data management area, working to put methodologies in place across multiple locations in three states. She took early retirement in 2000, but continued to work as a contractor for about six months.
Joining Wright Express
Her "retirement" was short-lived. A former colleague who worked at Wright Express told her about a job opportunity there. She started in 2000 as manager of the PeopleSoft applications development team. One of her projects involved upgrading to a new release of PeopleSoft. Another was converting 80 percent of the business from a legacy financial receivables system to PeopleSoft.
In 2004 Emery became senior manager of financial systems, data warehouse and reporting and transaction systems teams. Later that year she moved into her present job in technical ops.
She's enjoyed all aspects of her career and likes to share her insights with others. "I've been fortunate to see the IT organization from different viewpoints," she says.
Wright Express is fairly evenly divided: about half its employees are male and half are female, and even the IT department has a healthy representation of women. "It doesn't matter who you are here, just whether you do the job," she says.
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