February 28, 2001, 5:09 PM — MULTIPLE ACQUISITIONS are part of the strategic culture at WordWave, as CTO Lisa Censullo can attest from firsthand experience. They have presented her with some of her biggest technical and managerial challenges.
As the Boston-based court reporting, transcription, and videography company's first CTO, she functions as an agent of change. In just 18 months, WordWave gobbled up 19 smaller companies.
Upon joining the company after a phone call from WordWave President and CEO Perry Solomon, Censullo began immediately working alongside the company's top brass to think through the technical implications of each acquisition.
"When I started in April 1999, there were no standardized systems and processes to make these different, smaller companies part of a larger company," Censullo remembers. "I had to start from scratch on things like the standards we would use so we could communicate and share files."
Now pursuing different strategic business lines centered on digitized transcription and searchable multimedia, WordWave is up to 445 employees and retains another 1,500 outsourced workers.
WordWave was started in 1997 as LegaLink, which has since become a division of WordWave working with law firms that often need to obtain depositions from people in scattered locations using synchronized text/video depositions and multimedia trial presentations.
But WordWave is growing far beyond its court-reporting roots. The cultural challenges in bringing employees from so many separate companies into the WordWave fold have tested Censullo's management skills.
"Of all of the issues that became part of my job, the cultural differences were certainly the more difficult [issues], not the technology problems. Those you can fix," Censullo says.
Censullo says her attempts to bring on board a number of employees accustomed to operating in startup mode proved delicate. "Keeping people who were essentially entrepreneurs working in the company was sometimes difficult. Many of them were very easy to deal with, because they wanted the technology tools," the new parent company could afford, she says.
"But it was more of a challenge with others, because it meant change. And since I was a change agent for the organization, when they saw me coming, they knew something was going to happen," Censullo continues.
To retain employees and encourage them to embrace the changes she had in mind, Censullo says she worked at fostering communications with the top executives from the acquired companies, who were moved into area president positions at WordWave."I tried to involve as many people as I could in the process, without doing things like putting 30 people on a committee to study a problem," Censullo says.
But change seldom comes without some pain. For instance, Censullo enccountered resistance from some of the technical staff when she decided to migrate from Novell NetWare to Microsoft NT.
"I'd hear things like, 'I've not had to reboot this machine in 10 years,'" Censullo recalls. "I had to tell them why it was important to make the change, and why we had to do it. I even had to explain that it might not be as stable as what they were used to, but that we had to do it anyway."
Censullo is used to working out cultural differences, as a woman in technology. Her alma mater, Wentworth Institute of Technology, in Boston, had a 12-to-1 male-to-female ratio when she was attending the school in 1987 to get a BS degree.
Although she's unlikely to point to her early experiences as a metaphor for her current challenges, Censullo doesn't hesitate to take on questions about the alarming lack of females in technology fields.
In fact, she is active in Wentworth's recruitment efforts geared toward high-school girls. But Censullo disappointedly notes that not much has changed since her college days in terms of the number of women holding technology positions.
