"I think there's a tendency, especially when you go and engage with consultants and so on, to underestimate perhaps the complexity of these programs. And, as a consequence, instead of taking them in bite-sized chunks, you start to probably bite off a bit more than you can chew . . . then you have a bit of a digestion problem, to take the analogy to its full extent. I think the bank has just gone through that."
Crouch argues that excess media scrutiny of ISI ignores the many very positive developments under way in the bank. By the time he arrived the ructions were such that most observers would have been forgiven for thinking ISI was the only game the NAB was involved in, and that the bank was in a hole. Not so, he says. Just consider the fact that during his first six months at the bank the entire global economy had stalled in the wake of September 11, and the bank was grappling with all the challenges of the HomeSide disaster. Even so, it managed to formulate the Positioning for Growth statement, restructure and review all of its of leadership and still deliver a record half year.
"It gives you some sense of the real strength of the bank, the strength of the people within this bank," he says. "And my position has been pretty simple. I think technology is similar. We have some real strength in our people: the challenge for any technology organisation and I think the challenge for any CIO, is how do you unleash it? How do you give the people the responsibility and opportunities, and then say let's see what we can do?
"When I'm talking to people when I go around, I say ISI is only one of X number of programs. Everyone is happy with the others. But more importantly, what I try to say from a cultural point of view is that there are a number of things that we should be doing. We do need to be ambitious and be aggressive and push. We are going to have some [programs] where we're going to have problems; I think that's just part of the technology world we live in. The converse of that is if you're not trying to push it you end up becoming very conservative, and you don't start pushing the boundaries of the envelope, you stay within it because that's your comfort zone. And I think that would be a worse outcome for the bank."
As part of that drive Crouch has launched an Innovation Award program to recognise the "really creative things" being done in IT. He says his goal is to give visibility to these global initiatives and generate a sense of pride in the organisation. Similarly, part of becoming world class will involve picking up those innovations and using them in other countries to leverage the full capabilities of the bank.
"What we have to learn, as a technology organisation, is how to recognise where we really are doing some creative things which the market's after, and learn how to deploy them in other geographies very quickly," he says.separation of church and stateUnder the NAB's old structure, technology within the bank had been somewhat fragmented, with no clear global visibility. That in turn had led to inefficiencies and a lack of standardisation. Prioritisation was also being done at business rather than group level.
"I think the model that I inherited had implicit separation [between business and IT]," Crouch says. "The earlier version of the organisation that [previous CIO] Michael Coomer put in, to me sort of separated technology from the bank. There was a separate group called NSITE, which was really the national systems group, but effectively what that structure had was a sales and service organisation which was theoretically an interface to the bank. I just consider some of those concepts either dated or worse even, wrong."
While consistent with the thinking of the time, Crouch says the old arrangement created an "us against them" dynamic. It also got the technology people talking about the business as its customer. Wrong, he says. The NAB has only one customer, and that's a customer of the bank, and it should never lose sight of that customer. "Therefore I don't talk about people internally as customers," he says, "I talk about us being part of a team. With the [soccer] World Cup going on when I first joined, I tended to use football analogies, saying the business has its positions and in technology we have our positions, but ultimately unless the whole team is performing as an integrated team, we won't be successful."
Under the new setup Crouch effectively wears two hats: one as technologist and the other as an executive of the bank and member of the 100-strong group executive. It is a structure he is very familiar with, having helped steer major global institutions like CitiBank, Amex and ABN Amro along similar paths during his time with Booz Allan Hamilton and AT Kearney.
For now his main effort is focused on getting IT more tightly coupled and aligned with the business. That has involved co-locating the technology group with the business. "We're in the middle of the process of trying to do that at the moment, and certainly in our biggest unit, which is Australia, when the bank moves to The Docklands my plan is that the technology team will also move to The Docklands. That will mean that the technology people are co-located, they have visibility, they're working closely with the business. I think in that environment they're more current with what the business is trying to do. I think they also consequently can have more influence on the business, just in the day-to-day point of view."ducks in orderUnder Positioning for Growth, IT will revamp its planning, approval and governance processes, and completely re-evaluate its flexibilities. As for outsourcing, Crouch says the short answer is that the NAB will continue to outsource into the future. That does not mean the NAB plans to outsource its problems - that, he says, is how much of the industry got itself into problems.
"I've taken the view that what we will do is make sure when we're looking at these things we'll do everything we can to fix them ourselves. When we get to the point where we believe we've fixed it and have got the optimal performance that we can get, [then] if an outsourcer, through their own scale or whatever, can get better benefits and do a better job of it, then my position is as a bank we're obligated to look at it," Crouch says.
"There's about 10 major outsourcing arrangements that we have, but my position is we need to build real capability in outsource management - and we are. We need to get that bedded down very quickly, and at that stage certainly we're open to looking at other outsource opportunities."
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.