Wait - You bought what?
It’s not uncommon for technology decisions to be made independently by all business units. Departments buy the technology and apps they need to do their jobs. However, the impact to IT, cyber and risk are not always properly considered. These decisions are made, unintentionally, in silos. The impact includes potential security threats, burden on technology resources, integration and compatibility concerns, overlap among systems, and lack of alignment of technology.
As a result, IT departments are forced to firefight and react, balancing constant flows of requests, and trying to keep prioritization among the credit union without clear organizational direction. Departments feel like they can’t ever get their projects completed, and Risk Management is concerned about vendor management. Systems don’t work together like they promise, functionality is never fully realized and no one owns ongoing deployment and innovation of platforms (wasting investment and creating massive overlap. Credit unions usually use about 20% of an application’s functionality and have tremendous overlap, wasting huge investment in tech.
Here are just a few of the challenges faced by credit unions facing muddied waters create:
- Decisions are made in silos not in alignment with overall strategy or org priorities.
- New technology may not integrate with current systems.
- Business unit leaders are frustrated not getting their projects implemented fast enough.
- IT is always saying no due to resource or security constraints (CU’s force them here by not involving them but making them responsible).
- Overlap of functionality across platforms because business units buy for one feature not realizing full benefits and those are not communicated to all departments who may be able to use other features or departments buy similar products not knowing others have already purchased them.
- Lack of complete vendor and security review.
- No department owns the ongoing feature updates of all platforms, keeping them updated for security and features and then sharing the new innovations that could be felt with new features. It is common for people to have platforms with new capabilities that they are unfamiliar with.
- Training becomes an issue because no one knows all the systems in use.
- Security is far more challenging.
If your credit union is dealing with any of the issues above - Think|Stack can help.
We’ve created a series of workshops that helps credit unions first build an overall strategy that sets the IT direction for the organization to define what they want, and what priorities exist now and in the future. We then work through each department to understand their needs and help identify how technology can help them, creating a 2-3 year IT roadmap to bridge the gap between where they are, and where they want to be. Finally, we build frameworks and processes to avoid these issues from arising in the future, developing processes to create more alignment and involvement in future IT decisions.
This will give you:
- Organizational alignment around IT that busts existing silos
- Cost savings from overlapping applications/app creep
- Aligned technology that can be integrated to provide data, automation and performance
- Innovation by tapping into unused features and updates in existing applications
- Better IT investments and long-term strategy to make the most of your IT budget
