Posts Tagged ‘cio council’

Wachovia Can’t Modify Loans: Is This Another CIO Failure?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Image Credit Wachovia's Mortgage Systems Are Falling Down On The Job

Wachovia's Mortgage Systems Are Falling Down On The Job

Hmm, let me try and remember how this is supposed to go: the IT department exists to serve the rest of the company. If the department is doing its job, then the company should be able to operate smoothly and be able to outperform its competition, right? Over at Wachovia (purchased by Wells Fargo awhile ago) the IT systems are dropping the ball and people are in danger of losing their homes. Sounds like Avid Modjtabai, Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations, for Wells Fargo & Company, has got some explaining to do…

The Problem With Adjustable Rate Loans

This tale of woe starts back in the go-go days of the 1990′s when Wachovia, like just about every other bank, started handing out home loans like candy. They offered them to just about anyone who asked for them no matter if they could really afford them or not.

A lot of folks opted to get what are called Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) . These little babies are great when interest rates are low; however, when there is a global recession and interest rates start to go up, those monthly loan payments can quickly get out of hand. The Obama administration has realized that a lot people are in a bad way, and they’ve made a lot of cash available to banks so that they can convert ARMs to fixed rate mortgages (with a non-changing monthly payment).

If you want to change your loan, all you should have to do is go to your bank and work out a deal with them. Unless your loan is with Wachovia – then things get a bit more complicated.

Marchall Exkblad over at the Wall Street Journal has discovered that a computer glitch in Wachovia’s IT systems is preventing people from being able to modify their ARM loans. Avid Modjtabai, I think that you may have a problem on your hands.

The Problem With Wachovia’s Loan Software

It turns out that Wachovia has been forced to “recode” its computer system. They are saying that this is because of “some of the tweaks to the program” that the U.S. government made. What’s interesting about this excuse is that Wachovia customers have been attempting to get their loans adjusted since June (that’s roughly four months if you’re counting).

In Wachovia’s defense, they are saying that it’s hard to modify existing loans under the government’s guidelines for the $75B foreclosure-prevention plan. Umm, I’m cool with that, but the now-parent company Wells Fargo has been able to modify 11% of their loans in the time that Wachovia has been able to modify only 2% of theirs. What gives?

What The CIO Should Have Done

Once again, let’s review: the IT department and its systems exist to help the company do more and do it quicker. Over at Wachovia, that clearly is not happening right now. What should have been done?

Let’s assume that Ms. Modjtabai got handed a bill of goods back in October of 2008 when Wells Fargo agreed to buy Wachovia. She probably had no way of knowing what state Wachovia’s loan processing software was in when the purchase went down.

The problem comes after that deal was closed. A CIO in this situation needs to eliminate as many unknowns as possible. This means that the first thing that should have been done was a top to bottom audit of Wachovia’s systems: what did they have and what did each system do?

We all know that every unique system that you have to support is going to end up costing you a lot of IT budget that could be better spent on something else. That means that Wells Fargo should have used the results of the audit to create a plan for moving the Wachovia business activities over to Wells Fargo’s existing systems.

I’m not naïve enough to think that this would be easy to do, but in the end that is the job of the CIO – to simplify IT and create a path to move forward. The evidence seems to show that the Wells Fargo and Wachoiva mortgage processing systems are still separate. Whether due to poor design or financial neglect, Wachovia’s systems have not been able to keep up with changes in the market. At the end of the day, that’s the CIO’s job to solve.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, you need to realize that “the company” is a very fluid thing indeed. What the company looks like one day is not what it will be looking like down the road.

When your company purchases another company you will suddenly be responsible for the IT systems and staff that come along with that company. What you don’t know can kill your IT career.

The moment that the purchase deal closes, you need to be jumping in there with your IT team and turning over every rock in order to find out what you are now in charge of. This has to lead to a plan to merge the IT systems of both companies. You don’t necessarily have to keep the systems that the buying company is using, but you do need to minimize the number of systems that you will be left with.

Nobody ever said that being a CIO was going to be easy – the Wachovia loan processing software bug is just another example that a CIO’s job is never done.

Do you think that the Wachovia loan processing problem is the fault of the Wells Fargo CIO?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

We all dream of the day that we will get the nod to become CIO — finally we will have arrived. Or will we have? When you are CIO, things are going be different and that’s because you won’t just be the CIO, you’ll also be the company’s Strategic Execution Officer.

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Posted in crisis | 3 Comments »

Microsoft CIO Sidekick’s T-Mobile Users

Monday, November 16th, 2009
Image Credit
T-Mobile Sidekick Users Are Feeling A Sense Of (Data) Loss

T-Mobile Sidekick Users Are Feeling A Sense Of (Data) Loss

So this story should probably be filed in the “it should have never happened” drawer: Microsoft has lost the information that T-Mobile users of the Sidekick mobile phone entrusted them to store for them. Wait a minute, isn’t this the grand and glorious 21st Century in which data loss like this is never supposed to happen any more? How did Microsoft’s CIO let the ball get dropped like this?

Oops, Your Data’s Gone

Before we spend too much time going after Tony Scott, let’s take a moment and do what they do on CSI: take a look at the crime scene.

For the better part of a week T-Mobile subscribers who use the Sidekick mobile device have been having problems, lots of problems. Specifically, they have been having trouble getting access to their personal information. This has included contact lists, calendar data, photos, etc. Where was all of this data being stored? Why on Microsoft servers of course.

T-Mobile is now reporting that they have been able to restore the ability of the Sidekick to go online, they are also telling their users that they may not be able to recover their personal data. The exact phrase that was used was that the data “almost certainly” had been lost.

How Is This Microsoft CIO’s Fault?

At the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility for this lost of countless users’ personal data has to rest of the shoulders of Microsoft’s CIO, Tony Scott. I suspect that that job is a great job until something like this happens. Microsoft got into the business of hosting T-Mobile Sidekick user’s personal data when they bought the company Danger, Inc. back in early 2008.

Microsoft has broken the unwritten rule that hosted data must never be lost or destroyed – when we store things in the cloud, we are trusting the firm doing the storing to make sure that nothing bad happens.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

First off, if you use T-Mobile’s Sidekick device I’d suggest that you start backing up your personal data locally. Secondly, it’s pretty clear that the Danger, Inc. servers that Microsoft took ownership somehow got overlooked in the grand scheme of things.

Every CIO has to have a program in place that lays out step-by-step what the firm needs to do when they purchase another firm – the best example of a company that does this very well is Cisco. I can understand that the Danger, Inc. purchase happened before Tony Scott came on board; however, that is no excuse.

A CIO has to realize that he / she probably doesn’t have everything under control when they take the helm of the IT department. This means that a full audit of all servers being managed and just who is using them has to be one of the first things that a new CIO does.

Yes, Tony will probably survive this data loss disaster and yes, T-Mobile Sidekick users will probably continue to use the devices. However, there could be trust ramifications for the Cloud computing service called Azure that Microsoft is starting up – would you trust them with your data now?

Editor Update: Some Sidekick Data To Be Saved

In all fairness to Microsoft, I must report that on Friday, 10/16/09, Microsoft reported that they had been able to recover some of the lost Sidekick data. I can just imagine the mad scramble and expensive disk recovery resources that were involved in making this happen.

Congratulations to Microsoft for doing the right thing after the fact. Even given this “save”, it’s the CIO’s responsibility to make sure that things like this never happen in the first place.

What is the first thing that Microsoft’s CIO should have done when he realized that they had lost T-Mobile user’s data?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Over at Wachovia (purchased by Wells Fargo awhile ago) the IT systems are dropping the ball and people are in danger of losing their homes. Sounds like Avid Modjtabai, Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations, for Wells Fargo & Company, has got some explaining to do…

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Posted in crisis | No Comments »

Say Goodbye, Your Database Is Going Away

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Image Credit What Will Your IT Department Do Without Its Databases?

What Will Your IT Department Do Without Its Databases?

You know that database that your company relies on? No, not that one, the other one that is really, really important? Yep, that one – it’s going away, are you ready? It turns out that the databases that we’re using today were not designed for what we are asking them to do. All sorts of things like trying to deal with lots and lots of unstructured data is killing them. Looks like it’s time to go find yourself a new database. Are you ready?

The CIO’s Other Job

When you become CIO you are very quickly going to discover that on top of all of the cost cutting, uptime boosting, and IT team building that you have to do, you have yet another job. This is the job of chief technology visionary. The rest of the company (non-IT parts) are going to be looking at you to be all knowing and predict the (technology) future.

This means that you are going to be constantly learning. You’ll have to keep your fingers in a whole bunch of different pots so that when your CEO boss comes to you and says “I just read something about cloud computing, what does this mean for us?” you’ll have a smart and snappy comeback.

The Deal With Databases

As an example of the type of information that you are going to have to be staying on top of, let’s take a moment and talk about databases. They are the workhorses of the modern IT department. We set them up, pound them with requests, and desperately try to keep their contents secure.

However, we are at a critical junction with databases right now and things are getting ready to change. Are you going to be ready to tell your management and peers why things have to change and how they are going to turn out? If not, then read on.

Back in May of 2008 out at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, CA, Rakesh Agrawal and 26 other prominent database researchers got together to talk about this very issue. What came out of this meeting is what you need to know.

Causes…

Databases have to change. There are a number of reasons why they need to change and how they need to change. Here are some of the reasons that the brightest minds in the database world think that changes are coming:

  • Big Data: the datasets that we are working with have just become huge. What used to be an exception that was limited to government statisticians or astrophysicists, has now become almost commonplace and today’s databases were never designed to deal with this much data.
  • Big Money In Data Analysis: databases used to be something that ran quietly in the backoffice. However, nowadays databases are operating close to the front lines of business and are responsible for driving corporate profits. The arrival of business intelligence software has turned databases into real-time engines, a job that they were never designed for.
  • Unstructured Data: today’s databases like data that can be broken up into comma delimitated fields. However, a lot of the data that you find in a modern workplace is of the unstructured format: blogs, documents, web pages, etc. The databases that we are using were never designed to deal with data that is in this format.
  • The Arrival Of : Why Use The Cloud?” href=” http://www.theaccidentalsuccessfulcio.com/cloud-computing/cio-cloud-computing-101-why-use-the-cloud”>Cloud Computing: the very architecture of the corporate data center is starting to change. Will the database remain onsite or will it be hosted? How about the data that it is using – where will that be located? What kind of data latency and security issues will this cause?

… and Effects

“Great!” I can hear you saying, so things are going to change. How are they going to change – what will the future look like? The answer is … I don’t know. However, with the help of those smart database researchers we can predict what areas you are going to see the most change in (and thus are where you should be watching):

  • Database Engine changes: it’s got a Hemi! Well, maybe not but today’s database engines have been tuned for specific tasks (OLTP anyone?) and will basically need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to deal with tomorrow’s data needs.
  • Programmer Productivity: no matter how fast your database engine runs, if it takes your database programmers forever to program it, then business will still be moving too slowly. Creating a way for your non-expert database programmers to create good code that can run in a multi-processor environment is going to be a must.
  • Data Harmony: in future databases both structured and unstructured data are going to have to learn to get along with each other. Structured data is not going away even as unstructured data continues to grow. Tomorrow’s databases are going to have to be able to deal ably with both at the same time.
  • The Mobile World: the need to be able to provide real-time services to a large collection of mobile users who will be generating lots of user created data will become a critical function that tomorrow’s databases will need to be able to provide. The need to participate in virtual worlds as a mobile user will only increase the amount of data that will need to be processed.

What All This Means For You

When you become CIO, you are going to instantly be thrust into a spotlight where the rest of the company is going to be looking to you to understand and translate all of the changes that are occurring in IT technology. This will be a new role and in order to do it, you are going to have to start spending time researching what is going to be happening next in IT.

Your database systems are going to be a big part of the IT technology change. The reason that database systems are going to have to change range from the arrival of massive datasets, real-time processing demands, the arrival of unstructured data, and the emergence of cloud computing.

As a CIO you are going to have to be able to determine what changes in the database field you are going to have to watch because they will determine how the databases that you’ll be using tomorrow will operate. The key areas that will require your attention will include database engine changes, programmer productivity, data harmony, and support for mobile applications.

Spending your limited time watching these specific areas will provide you with the key insights that you will need in order to predict the future of database technology. Once you start doing this, you will have become the technology visionary that your firm wants in their CIO.

What function do you hope to add to your databases in the future?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So this story should probably be filed in the “it should have never happened” drawer: Microsoft has lost the information that T-Mobile users of the Sidekick mobile phone entrusted them to store for them. Wait a minute, isn’t this the grand and glorious 21st Century in which data loss like this is never supposed to happen any more? How did Microsoft’s CIO let the ball get dropped like this?

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Posted in database | No Comments »

The 5 Secret Characteristics Of A Truly Great CIO

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Image CreditThere Are Leadership Qualities That All CIO's Must Have...

There Are Leadership Qualities That All CIO's Must Have...

In all honesty, there are a lot of people who become CIO who really should never have been promoted to that position. There are too many IT folks who are only good at ensuring that company IT resources are properly and efficiently used. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, only that this kind of skill set is not what it takes to be a really good CIO. Do you know what it takes to be a good CIO?

Direction

When we start to think about what kind of qualities that a CIO needs to have in order to do his or her job correctly, hopefully the quality of being able to generate and communicate a clear sense of direction to others is one of the first ones that comes to mind.

Businesses never stand still – either they are moving forward or they are falling behind. A CIO does not lead the business, that’s the CEO’s job, but the CIO is responsible for showing the IT department the way that they are going to move forward. This involves creating two important things: goals and a vision.

Inspiration

Just knowing where you want the IT department to go to is not enough. As CIO you are also going to have to be able to get everyone in the department to get off their behinds and start to move in the correct direction.

It turns out that everyone is already moving, it’s just that they are moving in a whole bunch of different directions. A CIO that is able to inspire an IT department will be able to get everyone to line up and work towards making progress in the same direction.

Team Building

A great CIO realizes that although some people can be fantastic individual contributors, that’s not enough for an IT department to be successful. What is needed is for people to stop working by themselves and for them to start working as a team.

Although this may sound rather intuitive, it turns out that it runs counter to what most IT workers want to do. We all want to be recognized for our individual accomplishments and when you are working as part of a team, this can be much harder to do.

A great CIO has the ability to make people want to work as a part of a team because they realize that that is the only way that big challenges can be met. A great CIO will take the time to acknowledge the accomplishments of a team, but at the same time he / she has the ability to look within the team and understand who contributed what to the outcome.

Lead By Example

All too often, what the CIO says is not what he / she ends up doing. If the CIO is still throwing lavish brainstorming sessions for upper management when budgets get tight, then this will not go unnoticed.

A CIO who physically shows up when a big cut-over is being performed, or works a weekend when the rest of the team is struggling to meet a big deadline will earn the respect of the department.

Acceptance

Great CIOs realize that they have been appointed to manage the IT department by a higher authority, but they are not truly a leader until their people accept them as such. This is the kind of acceptance that can’t be commanded, it has to be earned.

In the case of a CIO, it will be a combination of things that cause a department to accept their leadership. Specifically, their staff will be looking for proof that the CIO is up to the job. It will depend on the CIO’s performance during a few fire drills, a demonstration of how the CIO handles a situation in which he / she has clearly made a mistake – do they admit it or do they blame someone else, and finally it will take time.

What All Of This Means To You

Potentially anyone can become a CIO. Only a very few of us can become a great CIO. The difference between the two types of CIOs comes down to one word – leadership.

We all like to talk about just what it takes to be a great leader, but what we all too often forget is that it’s not just about the CIO, but rather about the IT staff – is this a person that they want to be lead by?

A great CIO can be clearly recognized by five distinct characteristics: the ability to provide clear direction, the ability to inspire, the ability to build successful teams, commitment, and finally, being accepted as the leader by the rest of the IT department. Now you know what you have to do, go out and do it.

What do you think the most important characteristic of a great CIO is?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You know that database that your company relies on? No, not that one, the other one that is really, really important? Yep, that one – it’s going away, are you ready? It turns out that the databases that we’re using today were not designed for what we are asking them to do. All sorts of things like trying to deal with lots and lots of unstructured data is killing them. Looks like it’s time to go find yourself a new database. Are you ready?

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Posted in leadership | 4 Comments »

It Turns Out That CIOs Really Work In Sales

Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Image Credit The CIO Is Actually A Key Part Of The Sales Department...

The CIO Is Actually A Key Part Of The Sales Department...

It turns out that a company’s #1 salesperson is their CIO. They may not go on sales calls, have an assigned quota, or even be up-to-date on the company’s latest product pricing plans, but at the end of the day the CIO is the one who drives (or drives away) the most sales.

Why Software Can Kill A Sale

In our modern times, almost every company has a fancy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that they use to keep track of who their customers are and what they’ve either sold to them or promised to them. You might be thinking that when you become CIO your only obligation to the sales team will be to keep the CRM application up and running. Turns out you’d be wrong.

Life has changed a great deal over the last few years and the relationship between IT and a company’s sales teams has changed right along with it. This has been necessary because in today’s global economy a company’s customers want to be involved in the creation of your products. Your CRM software is going to be standing in the way of this.

What’s Wrong With The CRM Software That You Are Using

Customers are shrinking the number of vendors that they are willing to do business with in order to make their supply chains more efficient. This means that they are going to want to be able to work with your company in order to see their product suggestion ideas start to show up in your products. In a nutshell, they want you to change to better meet their needs.

Your CRM software is not only not going to be able to do this, but it’s actually going to be standing in your way once you are the CIO. At its core, your CRM software is an internal application that is designed to do one thing and do it well: it helps your salespeople to track their customers and it allows sales managers to track their salespeople. Note the absence of customers in all of this.

CRM software does a great job of managing your internal sales systems. However what you are going to need as CIO is a way to manage your customer relationships – the dialogue that is going on outside of your company’s walls.

All Of Those Other Customer Conversations That Need To Be Managed

The reason that this is now part of what a CIO has to do is because the way that the company’s sales teams interact with their customers is now very heavily dependent on the IT department. Let me count the ways:

  • Social Networking: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it and Sales is probably using it to reach out and connect with their customers.
  • Wikis: Gone are the days of static product documentation, say hello to dynamic documents that can be updated by customers based on their own experience with your product.
  • Product / Customer Portals: who wants to search through a company web site to find the information about just the products that they have bought? The era of customized portals that eliminate the clutter and just provide the information that a customer really wants has arrived.
  • Teleconferencing: sure voice calls were nice, but now we’ve got web-cams and shared whiteboarding tools that turn a dry short meeting into a dynamic interactive session.
  • Co-Design Tools: the old way of designing a new product or service and then taking it to the customer is out the door. Now customers can participate in the design process and what is produced is right the first time.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often CIOs see the Sales department as not being part of the company’s IT infrastructure. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. A much better way to look at things is to think of the CIO as being a key part of the company’s sales team.

When you become CIO you are going to be (partially) responsible for the success of the sales team. One of your most critical tasks will be to find ways to use the company’s IT resources to help the sales teams develop deeper and better relationships with their customers.

The old way of just making sure that the company’s CRM system is up and running will no longer cut it. You are going to have to do some homework and find out the multiple different ways that your salespeople are connecting with their customers. Once you know this, you’ll be better positioned to leverage your IT department to help them become selling machines.

Do you think that it is even possible for a CIO to mange all the ways that Sales will want to interact with their customers?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In all honesty, there are a lot of people who become CIO who really should never have been promoted to that position. There are too many IT folks who are only good at ensuring that company IT resources are properly and efficiently used. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, only that this kind of skill set is not what it takes to be a really good CIO. Do you know what it takes to be a good CIO?

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Posted in sales | 1 Comment »