Computerworld - Two years ago, Catherine P. Bessant was tapped to lead Bank of America's Global Technology and Operations (GT&O) group, which has more than 100,000 staffers and contractors in 40 countries. Here Bessant talks about leading a tech group that includes five CIOs as direct reports, the importance of employee diversity, and how relying too much on third parties for IT services can backfire.
You came into an IT leadership position from the business side. Was it a hard transition? I was helped by the fact that I've been a part of most of the businesses we serve. I came to the field having had a fair amount of experience using the technology.
What has been one of your most effective projects? After a lot of planning over many years, we're in the final stages of transitioning our California and Northwest regions' core banking systems into the model platform used by the company so that we have a single, core banking platform across the U.S. We retired 11,000 different batch jobs that ran daily and decommissioned 110 obsolete applications.
What was the impetus behind that project? The undertaking of an initiative like this is challenging. It produces a great benefit to existing customers but is not necessarily the next great product you're going to use to boost revenue. But one of the company's key operating principles is to clean up all legacy issues. Those targets are well in sight.
Catherine P. Bessant
Preferred social media: I follow both of my children, ages 11 and 15, on
Twitter.
Technology du jour: Siri is becoming my new best friend.
Personal productivity tool: Tablets. They make it comfortable for me to be efficient in the use of my time.
Off-hours pastimes: Fitness, and transporting, cheering on and being with my children.
Vice: Salt is my last remaining vice. I've become sadly vice-reduced.
Most people don't know... I've been a NASCAR fan since I was 11 years old. I used to make money cleaning up the Michigan International Speedway after the races.
What other projects have you overseen? We're proud of our mobile banking platform. We had the first mobile banking app for the iPhone. In terms of commercial clients, in the last 24 months we have made significant enhancements to the CashPro Online portal. We scaled it so that clients can use it globally. In our wealth management business, there's a portal called MyMerrill that now allows clients to see both their banking and investment accounts.
Have you had any failures along the way? We had a very public and painful degradation of service at the end of September 2011 in our online consumer banking space. From a statistical perspective, it was not nearly as damaging as the public perception of it. On our worst day, we successfully processed 97% of our customer interactions. But we took an event that should have been manageable and made it into a six-day event. We had media folks logging on to BankofAmerica.com and seeing a flash page meant to be a click-through page to online banking, and it used the words "occasionally unavailable" or "temporarily unavailable." It then offered a click-through, [but] anyone who looked at that page thought we were saying we were unavailable.
What did you learn from that experience? We need to be brilliant at reacting. We used to have some time to fix things. Now, because of the speed of technology, I know about [problems] at the same time our clients do, and our ability to react becomes as important as the ability to prevent.
How do you react appropriately? Most customers will try again, so it's very important that you fix the underlying problem so that their next attempt is successful. Then use social media to get accurate information out, and use flash pages and other components to effectively tell customers how to get service.
Which upcoming projects are you most passionate about? I am very passionate about using technology to reduce risk permanently. We always have to be agile, and the risks of tomorrow are different from today, but we think of technology as our No. 1 weapon in the art of risk reduction.
We have a couple of significant platforms that are almost at the end of their life cycle, and there's tremendous pull from the business and within GT&O to modernize our global banking platforms.
I'm also passionate about the diversity and breadth of our technological talent, developing people so they're well-positioned for the technology and operating jobs that exist in our company.
Does your quest for diversity include programs to attract more women to IT? CEO Brian Moynihan challenged me, saying "You have five CIOs, you're a woman and you can only come up with one CIO who's a woman?" He puts the accountability on me. I do know from experience that some strategies can be effective -- visible leadership, constant focus and development, and goal-setting and accountability. We sponsor Women in Technology & Operations, which is specifically designed to support women technologists as they go through their careers.
As more IT operations move into public and private clouds, how does that affect what you're looking for in IT staff? There is no substitute for world-class technology and engineering and math.
When I have seen projects that were too slow or too expensive or didn't work and play well with other projects, one of the root causes has been an overreliance on third parties. Coming into the job, I would have [valued] the versatility and general business management it takes to manage third parties. Now, I think an overreliance on third parties creates risk and gets in the way of outcomes.
-- Interview by Robert L. Mitchell
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