It is relatively rare for a person to be hired as a CIO to implement an already well defined information and communications technology (ICT) vision. That was the position that Jim Williams found himself in when he spoke to the Irish League of Credit Unions (ILCU) about its need for a chief information officer as specified in its ICT Vision document. Despite the state of other financial institutions today, the credit union movement in Ireland is in rude health, with some 505, individual, limited companies under the trading representative body of the ILCU. Collectively, Irish credit unions (CU) have 13.8 billion in assets, with total savings of 11.8 billion, loans of 6.8 billion and 2.95 million members. Those figures would be the envy of almost any bank in Ireland right now, but the credit union movement realised that to serve the needs of members, it needed to modernise and allow individual CUs to offer a more diverse range of services under the same ethos. After a long process, a vision document was produced that was passed at the Belfast annual general meeting in 2007. Setting out a four year implementation plan, the ICT Vision document called for a CIO to over see the implementation. Painful lessons had been learned in the past, and were not forgotten. Williams had been working for EirGrid, the electricity Transmission System Operator (TSO). Williams said that EirGrid had been going through “some heavy changes in coming out from underneath the wing of ESB”, but that those efforts were coming to an end. It was around then that he became aware of the opportunity at ILCU. Despite being in Ireland on and off for more than a decade, Williams had only a small awareness of the credit union movement and what it did. He said that he was attracted by the ethos of the movement, but was particularly impressed by the comprehensive nature of the ICT Vision document. “If you just read the ICT strategy,” said Williams, “it is phenomenal. To transform an enterprise like this through technology that dovetails with the business change and transformation, in my head the fit was tremendous. ”Williams met with the various stakeholders involved and all agreed that he was the man for the job. However, he ended up with a slightly different title, namely ICT strategy implementation manager, as opposed to CIO, but a rose by any other name…
Banking past
Williams has a long history in the financial sector, working for IBM Global Services for five years in the US, internet enabling banks. When he moved to Ireland in 1990, he worked with the information technology division of Bank of Ireland, in a software development/management role. This harked back to his early career when he had got a masters from Kansas University in Computer Science and spent ten years in programming, development and supervisory roles for development teams. “I grew up to be a technical director of development teams,” said Williams of this time. Of his time at Bank of Ireland, Williams said “The biggest thing there was when they went from 3270 main frame to client server model, which has since gone by the wayside.” After another spell back in the US, Williams returned to Ireland.“I worked in the business change unit in AIB Retail when I came back here in 1996.” Over the last ten years or so Williams said that he has been working in the change management area, primarily where the change is fuelled by technology. Despite his obvious expertise in software development, knowledge of the financial sector and change management experience, the ILCU role was a new challenge.
Transformation
“This is the biggest enterprise transformation programme I have ever had any in volvement in. This has certainly got heavy ICT and technological components, but the of the 505 credit unions in Ireland has a chairperson, a treasurer and boards can comprise 11-13 members on average. Each board is autonomous in its each credit union can make their own cost benefit decisions is more challenging, and I would say more rewarding, and throws up whoppers more so than just the delivery of the technology. ”Unlike many ICT visions, the one for the credit unions was pretty clear when Williams joined in 2009. “The vision of having a private credit unions cloud, having a centralised data warehouse, a business intelligence (BI) service, to support these 500 odd credit unions, to see their business performance and the results of their decisions graphically, regulatory compliance and of course access to payments and clearing systems for the Euro zone –that was there [in the vision document] and remains. So it was all pretty clear when set out.” The vision document had abounded scope, said Williams, to avoid cost and scope creep, and was set for a four year implementation period. The ICT office of the ILCU is about halfway through that implementation in terms of work done, but critically, is on time and within budget. The office comprises Williams, Malcolm Moir as network services manager and Carmel Carroll as business intelligence service manager. The office as it stands was really only completed “in its entirety” says Williams in August of 2009. With such a specific vision set out and approved in 2007, have recent economic factors changed things at all? Very little, according to Williams.
Ultimately, this will allow existing and new service providers to offer services to the credit unions too, and Williams reports there have already been approaches by service providers for this purpose.
Economic Impact
“It doesn’t impact the vision document one iota. It has impacted a bit in the business community. One reason it has impacted is because people who are members of credit unions still, and have for 20 years, love credit unions, and hate banks.” “People on the street love the ethos of the credit unions and the importance in Irish society of credit unions cannot be denied or diminished. But for the last 20 years, the need for other financial services to be available to members has been clear and backed up by recent research from Amarach,” said Williams, referring to a study conducted among members and non-members in 2009 confirming the need and desire for a wider range of financial services.
“People wanted to be able to do more than put money on deposit and then borrow against it. People wanted bankstyle services under the ethos of credit union management.” “So, the vision will deliver that,” states Williams. How the vision will deliver that is by implementing a private cloud for the credit unions that will act as a secure, private platform from which basic services can be made available to all credit unions. This service platform in the private cloud requires a capable network and that was one of the first elements of the ICT Vision document to be delivered.
“We are really not solely cost driven, but rather we are driven by getting these 500 odd credit unions into the twenty first century.” “Part of our mandate in the ICT office is to educate and in form,” explained Williams.“Our job is to lift the boats for the 505 credit unions.”However, as this process started some time ago, certain words and images have crept in, perhaps adding some vapour to the issue.
Cloud shadow
“The analogies used by the ICT office have evolved as means of delivering the vision of the ICT document has changed due to emerging technologies from the utilities delivered to house, such as water, electricity and gas pipes, to analogies of private communication rooms that allow members only room, to a network illustration that includes the cloud. But it is really just about educating and informing on what we are doing and what we can do.”With key planks of the ICT Vision implemented in the network and phase one of business intelligence services based on Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 11g with DNM Technology, the ICT office has earned the trust of the credit unions by delivering on time and within budget services that work and add value.
“There are possibly nine or 10 broadband providers delivering services into the 500 plus credit unions,” said Williams. “This can make things quite difficult for security, management and privacy. When you get into business intelligence, you might get into personally identifiable data and so there must be data protection. So when you have a technology infrastructure that facilitates fulfilling requirements, compliance needs and giving comfort to the credit union user community, you must have that within your own network, you can’t lash it out over the open Web.”
Network
After a tender process, Interfusion Networks were chosen as the supplier for the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) enabled network. Williams defers to his network specialist Moir, “We went out to tender some time ago and various players responded but we chose Interfusion because of the geographical diversity of the credit unions. Trying to roll out an MPLS network across every town in the country, north and south is a challenge. Interfusion is a virtual network operator and that fitted our model pretty well.” “Individually the CUs all have IT suppliers for their infrastructure, for their savings and loan system and banking, email,” said Moir. “What we are doing is building a kind of private market place for 500 SMEs to get access to new IT services.” “We would see ourselves as service enablers to give credit unions access to these new suppliers.”
Job scope
“That is a key point,” added Williams. “The scope of our job is mandated in the ICT strategy. So our job is not to go out and develop tonnes of services that plug into the cloud and say credit unions use them, it is to enable existing suppliers and clever new suppliers to leverage this market place to service the needs of the credit unions with in the cloud under a common infrastructure, at a reduced cost as a peripheral benefit.
But there is still much more to do, Williams said, around the next phase of BI, electronic message architecture and core systems. “Within the scope of ICT, we have a few more things to do. The network is delivered, the private, secure MPLS managed network is available to all credit unions, with a hundred plus connected or connecting but that leaves 400 odd still to educate and connect.”
With a clear road map for what must be done, Williams is mindful of past experiences, though not on his watch.“We are not ISIS,” he said, referring to the notoriously expensive attempt to centralise credit union core functions in the early part of this decade. “The intent of it was to have satisfied some of the core infrastructure needs. But its scope was to have created a huge centralised savings and loan and accounting system, centralised for processing. It was probably a bad idea to start with by trying to centralise core business functionality.” “ICT is not ISIS,” he states.“We are working in concert with all the IT suppliers, because they believe us and we believe them. ISIS would have shut out a lot of the current IT suppliers due to its approach, because it was very credit union centric, and not supplier inclusive.”
Keeping up
With so much on his plate, Williams said that he has always found time for self education and relies heavily on the likes of analyst and vendor seminars to keep up with trends and technologies. Periodicals too form an important part of his education resources. “Talking to people who understand the same vernacular in groups of peers is also very important and valuable,” said Williams. Surprisingly perhaps, he also maintains that by “reading proposals, you learn a fair bit.” With the kind of transformation now occurring in the credit union movement, one might wonder how Williams finds the time to read proposals at all.
