CoVer story | BAnKInG
It isn’t always about creating the next decoder ring. It is about making the firm function in a world-class way. I’ve been very fortunate, and we’ve done it deliberately, to recruit talent who understand that simplifying the foundation, believe it or not, is exciting. But it is not everyone’s cup of tea, and it really takes the right kind of technology leadership, too. Can you give a broader perspective of the overall strategy toward risk mitigation and reducing risk? The best answer to risk is brilliant design. When you have the opportunity for green field design, it’s important to make sure that it’s designed for risk mitigation; again, not always glamorous, but absolutely achievable and, in my view, very exciting. When you don’t have the opportunity for green field, so in other words you’ve got long-established systems, you must understand what you would do to design for risk reduction if you had a blank sheet of paper, understand the distance between where you are and where you want to get to, and then really have a plan with the right aggressiveness. Because sticking to those strategies over time is not for the faint of heart at all. It takes guts, it takes deep understanding of both the business and IT, and it takes a bull-doggedness to say ‘no, we’re not going to be distracted by the feature of the day’. We understand where we have to get to in order to reduce risk. We’re going to fund that concurrently with funding the development of new capabilities. I’ve been really fortunate because the things that you have heard me or seen me say publicly are also things our CEO says. So we’ve been very fortunate as a company to have a management team that’s united around these things. I don’t know what it would be like to be a CIO in a chain that was not convinced about the importance of simplification. i know you also do some pretty aggressive training and boot camps and things around that. Can you talk a little bit about how that works? Well, I like the concept of boot camp because it implies everything I actually
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www.mis-asia.com
July–August 2013
mean for it to imply. It implies intensity. It implies focus. It implies coming in one way and leaving another way. And that’s really what we’ve been doing. Boot camp one was around reduction of risk and understanding of operational risks in both technology and operating capabilities. Boot camp two focused very much on process-by-process control plans, so that we know where our fundamental controls are–and I’m going to totally geek out on you now–where our compensating controls are. And then boot camp three will focus on some specific issues of the day, which would, of course, include things like business continuity and cybersecurity. We’ve performed extraordinarily well in times of business continuity tests, but we’ve certainly been tested by Hurricane Sandy, the tsunami and earthquakes in Japan, with the global footprint where we operate. So, boot camp three will be about managing specific risks of the day. one of the things that we know from our audiences is that dealing with acquisitions is very challenging. You have been through some really big acquisitions. What have you learned and what’s the advice for it people on how to manage that process and make it work as successfully as possible? Getting through transitions, making tough decisions and executing them, does not get better with time. So a key to success is using appropriate speed in decision making and execution. Any company like ours, which has gone through a number of acquisitions, a lot of what we’re simplifying is work left undecided or undone in various transitions over 25 years. The focus of every transition is making sure the companies that come together face off into the marketplace with customers and clients as a unified company. What can’t happen is that the back office be left to be figured out later or handled in a subsequent budget period, because that adds to complexity, that makes the challenge of future revenue and future profitability harder because there’s an embedded underinvestment in completing the transition.
The big learnings for me are: run through the fire, don’t walk through it, and make sure that the back office work does not get left undone, un-transitioned or unconsolidated. i have to go back to one point you made at the beginning. You said ‘i hate big data.’ that puts you in the minority these days, when everybody seems enamored of it. Why do you hate it? Well, I hate the term. I love good data. I hate the term actually because it implies something monumental out of something that should be fundamental, and should be basic, which is the creation of accurate, timely data on a reliable basis. And then the use of that data, by smart people in a company, who can turn it into market advantage. That’s what we do in business. Even when I was using a slide rule or, worse yet, when we were doing spreadsheets on corporate customers with Lotus Notes, what you’re still doing is producing data and using it to make decisions. So to call it big data and to think of it as something monumental or something that’s all going to be so ethereal we’ll have to look to the sky to see it, that isn’t what it is at all. It’s the most fundamental thing we do in business, which is drive decision making from fact. Makes sense. So you come from a non-tech background as a Cio. What are the advantages and disadvantages of coming up through a different part of the company? The advantage that it brings is I understand what the businesses are after. And we’ve done a good job of building a team that also understands what the businesses are after, and that tech doesn’t exist in isolation. In fact, tech’s only job is to support the business of the company, whether that business is customers and clients or that business is brilliant risk or capital management. So being able to understand, not the intersection, but the unique relationship between the supporting function tech has to play, and what the businesses that drive the company have to do, has given me a real advantage.