Green Dot is a rapidly growing young company. With customer activity increasing steadily, call centre operations were struggling. "It was unclear to our CEO whether our call centre issues were due to systems problems or operational management, so he wanted one executive to be accountable for both," says Goldin. "Once I moved into the new role, I sat down with the VP of customer care and together we designed a call centre strategy for redundancy and scale. We sorted out our staffing issues and turned the corner on service levels." His advice for CIOs who have just moved into an integrated role:
Hire a CIO. IT people represented more than 70 percent of Goldin's newly integrated organization so some of the senior call centre managers thought, 'Now I work for IT.' "That is not the perception that I wanted," says Goldin, "but I was reluctant to let go of the CIO role. Were I to have hired a new CIO, it might have been clearer that IT was not simply absorbing the call centre, but that we were integrating."
Go for the sudden impact. As head of IT and ops, you have a number of opportunities to add value. But, says Goldin, "You want to choose the areas where you can make a quick impact. Having had the initial call centre success, I felt I had the time to focus on other issues like reducing cost. The call centre bought me the time to tinker with the areas that I understood less."
From 1993 to 2000, Rob Autor was CIO for Nellie Mae, a Massachusetts-based student-loan provider. He joined Salle Mae following its acquisition of Nellie Mae in 1999 and has served in a number of senior roles, including vice president of consumer operations and CIO. In late 2007, Autor was named EVP of operations and technology and heads up the company's loan origination, servicing and call centre operations, corporate procurement and IT. In addition, he has full profit-and-loss responsibility for the company's guarantor services business and financial institution sales. With both of these business lines and a CIO reporting to him, he is responsible for reducing costs by 20 percent and for restructuring the business in response to the recently signed College Cost Reduction and Access Act.
To Autor, giving accountability for IT and operations to one executive makes good sense for Sallie Mae. "Both IT and our loan servicing operations are service organizations, and both require a strong degree of process discipline and design," he says. "When so many of our customers experience us through our technology, it is important to look closely at how both organizations can work together for a seamless customer experience." His advice for executives interested in a similar role:
Get both IT and ops under your belt. "I have moved between business and IT roles and deliberately made choices to broaden my experience," he says. "When I had some IT consulting under my belt, I went into business consulting. When I took on the CIO role at Nellie Mae, I took on operations responsibilities as well. The great thing about IT is that it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that you can deliver on big, broad, complicated, expensive projects. Make the most of that exposure."
Martha Heller is managing director of the IT Leadership Practice at the ZRG, an executive recruiting firm in Boston. Reach her at mheller@zrgroup.com.
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