John Crane, former CIO of National Australia Bank, spoke at The Marketing Practice's Sales & Marketing Forum about how suppliers could more effectively reach decision-makers in his position. The slides give an overview of what suppliers need to know about the role of a CIO in a retail bank, how they work as part of an exec team, how they interact with the rest of the business, and how their department may be structured. There are also some prompts for suppliers looking for closer sales and marketing relationships with CIOs (including the question of whether the CIO is the right target in the first place...).

3. • Concentrated in a few major players
• Two or three challenger brands
• Smaller, regionally-based building societies focusing on Savings
and Mortgages
• Conservative customer base
• Branch-based channels remain all-important
• All the main players are pursing a transformation agenda — holy
grail of integration across channels, products and information

4. Main Responsibilities:
• Keeping the lights on 24/7 (processing failures big news)
• Corporate cost reduction (process and customer service
improvement)
• Reducing the cost of Technology for the organisation
• Satisfying the demand for new Technology (mobile banking,
social networking)
• Delivering major transformational programmes of work
(including integration work from M&A activities)

5. Main responsibilities continued:
• Leadership of a large, diversified group of Technology professionals
• Managing complex external partnerships for the benefit of the organisation
• Educating peers and colleagues on the value of technology deployment –
creating a compelling vision for IT
The CIO will be a senior Bank Executive, with a voice on
the Bank’s EXCO but probably not with a place on the main
Board, despite the fact that Technology plays a key strategic
role in retail financial services

6. • Age of the Technology estate (core banking system likely to be
very old)
• Provides stability (minimises outages) but hard and risky to change
• Therefore inhibits the level of integration across different
platforms and the ability to introduce new technology — hard to
achieve a single customer view, joined-up business intelligence,
exploitation of mobile technology
• Risk and cost of change to the core banking system is enormous
(at least two UK Banks wrestling with core system projects)
• The order book is unaffordable and therefore requires
prioritisation
• Regulatory and compliance demands

7. • Complex portfolio of change to oversee — time-
consuming from a prioritisation and control perspective;
projects not delivering
• Shortages of critical skills, not just in new technology
but also for legacy systems
• Complex processes not well understood
• Poor data quality
• Reduced funding
• Periodic crises to manage (outages and process failures)

8. CIO
IT Strategy Applications
Business Operations Governance
and Development
Transformation and Services and Risk
Architecture Services

9. • Will be frustrated with the pace and cost of change
• Disappointed that their key projects have been deprioritised in favour of others
• Perceive IT as costly, bureaucratic, not agile — the Business Prevention Police
• Perceive the CIO as process and technology bound, not a business leader
• May not be Technology literate and therefore not understand why it all so difficult
• May not consider IT as a critical part of the company’s products and services
• Will have an array of suppliers (consultants, technology firms) who have the
solution to their problems
• Attempting to wrest control of bits of the Technology empire in
order to drive their own agendas

10. The best CIO’s will recognise this political reality,
will not feel threatened by it, will relish the
complexity and challenge. His or her prime skill in
dealing with this is through building strong and
trusting relationships with senior colleagues.
Communications and relationship-building skills are
critical competences for the CIO.

11. • Important to recognise the competing demands on the CIO — it is not a simple job
• In his complex world, your product or service just may not be very important to the CIO
• Build relationships across the business but the CIO also needs to be onside
• Be aware of but don’t try and play the internal politics
• Recognise that your product/service is unlikely to be the silver bullet
• Don’t overstate previous experience in other organisations
• Be prepared to start small and demonstrate capability and competence
• Demonstrate thought leadership but based on real world experience
• The CIO will have the power of veto
• The CIO will rely on trusted partners, people or firms that
he/she will have worked with extensively