Industry lacks sufficiently competent CIOs, says First National Bank (FNB) CIO Yatin Narsai.
"This may sound damning, but I don't think you have the right to call yourself a CIO before you've demonstrated a track record of concrete delivery, not once but several times," he says.
Competent CIOs are also leaders who can inspire their teams and cultivate a next generation, he adds, saying that too many CIOs are only as good as Google and what they read in a Gartner study.
The "number one" issue facing CIOs today is delivery. Narsai says callow CIOs, who lack concrete delivery experience, create complexity for themselves and their employer.
"They tend to outsource more and create additional layers of management," he says. They are also less likely to deliver a project on time and on budget. This, says Narsai, underwrites his view that CIOs must have "hard core experience in doing projects themselves", before being let loose on unsuspecting organisations.
What makes CIOs of the right calibre even harder to find is the increasing need for them to understand their company's business and business model. "For a CIO to be successful, that CIO must understand the business, especially in banking where the deliverables are intangible. There is no product you can see or kick."
Innovation is key
Narsai says it is critical for CIOs at FNB's various business units to understand the nature of their beast as they are under constant pressure to reduce IT costs and increase efficiencies: more so since all the "easy stuff", in terms of automation and process improvement, has already been done.
He explains that innovation is now the order of the day. One recent success story is processing credit approval at the transaction level, which includes accepting or rejecting monthly debit orders.
"This was a complex area with lots of backlog and staff, but after some process re-engineering and 'using technology a whole lot smarter', the team on that task now handles five times the workload it had just a year ago. There is now sufficient spare capacity for the team to also concentrate on improving service levels."
IT at FNB is intentionally decentralised, Narsai says, to ensure each distinct business unit in the group takes ownership of its IT needs. Therefore, every business unit is entitled to an integrated IT department with end-to-end responsibility. The technology needs of various divisions, such as branches, Internet and ATMs, are also divergent.
"No one IT management team can run those in one IT ship. At best the bank concerned would enjoy mediocrity," Narsai says. He says an attempt to centralise in the period 2001 to 2004 ended in "complete disaster".
"It reaffirmed our view that the deployed IT model is the correct model for banking. There is no alternative."
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