Evolve to Inspire Growth: An Interview with Jonathan Legault, President of ITI

What is ITI’s role in Quebec’s tech sector?

Formerly known as ProContact, ITI has just turned 30. What used to be a break/fix computer shop is now a full-fledged corporate project. We help medium and large businesses, as well as the public sector in using technologies to solve their business problems and increase their productivity.

Throughout the years, ITI acquired a solid reputation with business owners, decision makers, and tech directors in the province. We are not just computer resellers anymore; we have become expert consultants who develop IT solutions for businesses. This philosophy allowed ITI to grow constantly and sustainably within the last decade.

What is your long term vision for ITI?

First of all, we want to consolidate our position as a market leader in Quebec, and we’re already on our way to accomplish that. Our experts are here to assist, share their expertise, and help pick the right solution among all the products available. We are democratizing IT.

Later on, we will focus on a sustained and manageable growth that will help make ITI the obvious choice whenever businesses and organization are looking for a well-established partner to help them achieve a successful digital transformation.

What priorities are you tackling during this growth?

ITI has entered a pivotal year. We’re implanting new structures, we’re improving our internal processes, we’re developing new resources, we’ve launched a new brand, and we’re deploying new systems that will allow us to capitalize on our business intelligence.

These projects we are committed to delivering are the cornerstone of our future. So our priority is to carefully execute our plan to insure and support our growth.

You mentioned the new brand – what motivated ProContact to become ITI?

Actually, it all began during a review of our internal marketing processes we initiated following our growth. We realized our name and image did not reflect the breadth of our solutions and did not do justice to what we have become.

ITI stands for “IT Intelligence”. This idendity allows us to talk more efficiently to our market and communicate more clearly our position as the strategic and technological partner we have become for our clients. Besides, this new name is much more appropriate to support our ambitions in the English-speaking markets.

What represents the biggest challenge for ITI throughout all these changes?

A substantial challenge when you grow this much is to preserve the culture that made the business successful in the first place, while also deploying a scalable organisational structure. You have to strike the perfect balance between agility and robbust processes.

ITI’s continuous growth has turned it into a major player. We have a high-end expertise and we have obtained the highest level of certification from world-class partners, but we have also managed to preserve our agility, our flexibility, and a human dimension that allow us to better support and assist our clients.

Nowadays, we are able to rapidly mobilize our teams and overcome multiple challenges while working towards a common objective. By deploying the right IT infrastructure and the right tools, Quebec’s businesses will be able to preserve their organizational culture and put humans at the heart of their operations to boost their competitive edge.

How do you attract and keep the best talents – particularly during a period of labour shortage – to help you overcome these challenges?

It’s a fact that there is a very high demand for qualified experts nowadays. Investing in the people we work with is all the more important, for example through yearly training that allow them to expand their knowledge and expertise. Our turnover is low because we offer a professional development path and the opportunity to work on challenging projects.

Besides, our team has attained some of the highest certification levels in the industry with multiple manufacturers and partners. Talent attracts talent! Highly qualified experts often ask to join our ranks at ITI because they want to work with people like them on major IT projects. We benefit from this training effect.

Were your teams successful in switching to remote work? How did the COVID-19 crisis affect ITI?

The pandemic changed our lives, the way we work and consume, and it forced us to rethink and develop a new, resilient business model that can adapt to this new reality. Thankfully, we already had the technological infrastructure in place to allow us to work remotely, and we had already tested our disaster business continuity plan. ITI was prepared.

That being said, we had to adjust our offer. Some of our business units saw a rapid increase in demand for our services and expertise. We focused our efforts on supporting our clients and walking them through the major changes they’re facing.

Our flexibility allowed us to face the pandemic. Our experts are thrilled by the demand for our technologies, and by the projects we are working on. Our company was ready. ITI is here to meed the current business needs as well as the new ones that will emerge following this paradigm shift.

What advice would you give to business leaders who hesitate to launch their digital transformation?

First of all, in our current situation, people are understandably scared of investing in major projects. However, there are new technologies and new on-demand or as-a-service models that make it possible to rapidly acquire and deploy the technologies you need, while also preserving your capital and reducing your financial risks. It is imperative that leaders understand these options, and our experts are here to help you pick the right technologies and the right financial models.

In other more traditional businesses, leaders are sometimes more reluctant to migrate their operations to new technologies for which they have little or no internal expertise. Our mission is to listen to them and help them benefit from these technologies without all the hassles. Once they’re deployed and mastered, organizations benefit substantially from these new technologies, they become much more productive, and it all grows on them.

The most important thing is to make the first step by talking to experts who will have the patience to explain these new technologies and models, and who will take the time to match them with the needs of your organizations. This is what ITI is all about.