Technology Should Be More Proactive and Secure

By Anthony Cinquemani, CIO, Application Deliver - Delivery Channels Regions Financial Corporation

Anthony Cinquemani, CIO, Application Deliver - Delivery Channels Regions Financial Corporation

Steering transformational initiatives within business environment that typically required IT

Over the past several years, much leadership focus was applied to shifting the culture of the Technology organization from one that was perceived to be in an order taking mode to one that is proactively engaged with our business partners acting as a consultative resource and making solution recommendations for both stated and anticipated business opportunities. The success of this transformation has fed additional change as we have insourced or are in the process of insourcing the application development of several high visibility functionally intensive systems.

Things done to elevate IT's relationship with the business

As we continue to make progress in engaging with our business partners in the solution development process we are making deliberate decisions around implementing enterprise solutions vs. line of business specific solutions. We have recently implemented an enterprise document imaging and management system for a specific business need.

However, due to our enterprise view, this solution has been deployed to several other business areas and additional are in queue for deployment. We are implementing an electronic signature solution following a similar enterprise strategy; based on previous success business areas are proactively lining up to be included in our deployments of the solution. Finally, we saw an opportunity to meet a specific business need for access to information not readily available.

Manner in which data is used to head off problems and complications before they happen

We are in the process of deploying tools that allow us to automate the utilization and leveraging of machine data in support of raising the bar on system availability as well as reducing the time to resolution associated with the inevitable severity issues that occasionally come up. The expectation is that we will further leverage these utilities as we have the opportunity to apply the concepts to other areas of the operation such as fraud detection and avoidance, and improving the customer experience.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

Cyber threats have become one of the top risks in our industry. The ability to detect, analyze and prevent these threats continues to be an area we want to improve. Solutions will continue to be needed that are truly responsive to threats, provide better security for the financial sector and are effective to implement from both a cost and time perspective. More solutions are needed in the area of asset management and tracking.

Technology trends in enterprise business environment

Social media is driving technology leaders to focus on system availability and stability. This one channel alone can share information in a new way that CIOs have not had to deal with in the past. Mobile computing is a growing trend where our customers and associates want the ability to connect remotely from anywhere. CIOs must decide how to support this trend and keep it available and secure. Cloud computing continues to be advertised as a faster and cheaper option for deploying computing technology. The larger analysis is public cloud vs. private cloud.