IT Strategy Continued
Posted by Trey Reeme on December 9th, 2005
Doug (and other readers),
If you can get your hands on a December 2005 copy of CUNA’s Credit Union Magazine, you definitely should! Flip to page 44 and you’ll find a great article called “IT Evolution.”
This article may be extremely close to what was mentioned in the last post here.
The IT Evolution article reads in part, “The CUNA Technology Council … identified six strategic trends business strategists and IT staff must ponder to leverage technology to achieve business strategies.”
The steps are well-detailed, and they include (most of this is verbatim):
- Play well with others: Business Strategy/IT alignment. – “IT staff must have a basic understanding of the CU in addition to technical skills and knowledge; technology will miss the mark unless it aligns with business strategy; manage compliance in a continuously evolving technology environment supporting the CU’s strategic plan”
- Keep your head above water: Risk management. – “When it comes to business continuity and technology, much of what’s usually discussed has to do with recovering members’ data. But there’s much more to it than that, as hurricane-stricken credit unions know well…. Network infrastructure, communications, and branch processes and procedures are additional considerations.”
- Safeguard members’ trust: Security and privacy. – The article discusses member and staff education about ID theft and phishing. It also discusses new two-factor authentification regulations issued by the FFIEC and new anti-phishing take-down services like MarkMonitor.
- Be there for them: Electronic delivery channels. – Such as instant messaging, cell phone account access, communicating through BLOGS, video communication transforming call centers into multimode contact centers.
- Speak the same language: Openness and integrated technology – “Ensuring openness and ease of integration among technologies comes down to vendor selection. Credit unions must know what architecture their vendors use. This ensures credit unions don’t end up with disparate systems requiring the expensive interfaces of yesterday …. (Also) Credit unions must document all changes in their systems and have written fallback plans in case changes fail.”
- Consider how we pay: Payment infrastructure – The article mentions Mark Sievewright, SVP of Fiserv, as highlighting the following key U.S. payment trends at the CUNA 2005 Future Forum:
- “Check use is declining faster than expected.”
- “Debit card growth continues to accelerate.”
- ACH “use for check payments and online bill payment is increasing.”
- “The credit card marketplace continues to consolidate”
- “Payment subsegments are emerging where, for example, medical payments and health savings accounts require focused payment-related strategies and resources.”
Hope this helps! The article is by Tom Kroen and Jim Morrell, both board members of the CUNA Technology Council.
Hey, you are calling out your loyal reader. Thanks for the recognition. I did read this article when the magazine came out a week or so ago. Tom and Jim among others featured in the article have done a masterful job in highlighting the evolution of the IT function in the credit union industry. Credit unions do need to follow this advice on having technology leadership at the executive table and most importantly part of the on-going business plan process. On-going being the key word here as annual planning is being replaced by real time planning. The alignment between technology and the strategy of the credit unon is one of the most important factors to get right in today’s credit union environment. I second Trey’s recommendation – this article is a must read for not just credit union tech heads but also all credit union team members. Keep up the good work on this blog.