Suzanne Shep­pard

It was def­i­nite­ly not a case of love at first sight for Frances Cor­reia and com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy. That is a sur­pris­ing ad­mis­sion from Mi­crosoft T&T's first fe­male coun­try man­ag­er, who de­spite her po­si­tion in a glob­al tech firm, can hard­ly be de­scribed as a com­put­er geek."The tech­nol­o­gy seems to love me more than I love it," she told the Sun­day Guardian in an in­ter­view at the com­pa­ny's new Mu­cu­rapo Road, St James, head­quar­ters.

"My in­ter­est in tech­nol­o­gy has al­ways been not the tech­nol­o­gy by it­self and for it­self but what the tech­nol­o­gy can do and en­ables me to do."Cor­reia, who has a BSc in com­put­er sci­ence, busi­ness man­age­ment and, an ex­ec­u­tive MSc in or­gan­i­sa­tion­al de­vel­op­ment, said she be­came an IT pro­fes­sion­al "quite by ac­ci­dent." She was ac­tu­al­ly purs­ing a busi­ness de­gree when she had her first en­counter with what was known back then as com­put­er sci­ence.

"I was do­ing a very nor­mal busi­ness de­gree and part of that course was com­put­er sci­ence," she said. "In those days com­put­er sci­ence was a very new thing, so I took a cou­ple cours­es. I had no par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est in it but I had a pro­fes­sor who ab­solute­ly be­lieved in me and con­vinced me that I should pur­sue it, which I re­luc­tant­ly did.

"I did a dou­ble ma­jor. Came back home quite ex­cit­ed to get in­to busi­ness since I come from a busi­ness fam­i­ly. I thought I was com­ing back to start my own busi­ness but the tech­nol­o­gy field kept call­ing me. Every time I tried to do some­thing else, I kept get­ting pulled back."Now, with more than 20 years in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness ex­pe­ri­ence, this IT in­dus­try vet­er­an is con­vinced her po­si­tion at the helm of Mi­crosoft T&T is "ac­tu­al­ly a cul­mi­na­tion of that orig­i­nal pas­sion" for busi­ness.

Cor­reia's mis­sion...in­creas­ing Mi­crosoft's pres­ence

"Our vi­sion is how do we en­able busi­ness­es," she said.Meet­ing that goal, she ad­mits, is very chal­leng­ing. Her com­pa­ny's ju­ris­dic­tion is the south­ern Caribbean–every­thing south of Ja­maica, in­clud­ing French Guiana–which presents sev­er­al com­plex­i­ties with ge­og­ra­phy and dif­fer­ent lan­guages and cul­tures in a very di­verse mar­ket.

"We reach the en­tire re­gion through our part­ner net­work. We have in Trinidad alone over 400 part­ners who use our tech­nol­o­gy to build their own so­lu­tions and sell them to cus­tomers. We have 400 in Trinidad and 1,000 across the re­gion," she said.

Cor­reia's mis­sion is to sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease Mi­crosoft's pres­ence through­out the re­gion. Based on a study done a few years ago, the glob­al tech gi­ant has a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic im­pact in this part of the world–every dol­lar it earns be­comes $23 of down­stream in­come with its part­ners adding val­ue in­to the chain."My goal is to move that from $1 to $23 to $1 to $100," Cor­reia said.

Her track record in the in­dus­try sug­gests she is more than able to achieve these and oth­er busi­ness goals she has set for the com­pa­ny over the next few years. Pri­or to join­ing Mi­crosoft, Cor­reia was ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent–gov­ern­ment busi­ness, of Fu­jit­su Caribbean, a sub­sidiary of the glob­al Fu­jit­su Cor­po­ra­tion.

She led the re­gion­al gov­ern­ment busi­ness unit for three years and for nine years pri­or to that, held the role of ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent–ser­vices, where she was in­stru­men­tal in de­vel­op­ing the pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices ca­pac­i­ty with­in Fu­jit­su and led the de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion teams of the net­work op­er­a­tions group which man­ages one of the largest WAN (wide area net­work) in the Caribbean.

Dur­ing her tenure at Fu­jit­su, Cor­reia com­bined these ini­tia­tives to cre­ate a re­gion­al shared ser­vices net­work op­er­a­tions cen­tre and ser­vice desk from which lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al cus­tomers are served with a menu of re­mote mon­i­tored and man­aged ser­vices de­liv­ered to in­dus­try best prac­tices.

She served pre­vi­ous­ly, as the IT and busi­ness so­lu­tions man­ag­er at a lead­ing lo­cal gen­er­al in­sur­ance com­pa­ny where she de­vel­oped the first lo­cal gen­er­al in­sur­ance Ge­o­graph­ic In­for­ma­tion Sys­tem (GIS), spe­cif­ic to the in­sur­ance mar­ket in Trinidad.Even in her leisure pur­suits, Cor­reia is known for reg­u­lar­ly set­ting and meet­ing new goals, most re­cent­ly pi­o­neer­ing the first all-fe­male crew in pow­er boat rac­ing in the Caribbean.