The CIO shouldn’t be the only person at your organization responsible for figuring out innovation or technology. That’s something that should rest on the shoulders of the entire C-Suite.
Staying abreast of technology trends must be part of the C-Suite agenda. We don’t have a “Chief Innovation Role” at Vanguard. It’s part of the C-Suite expectation that we all understand our business and the role technology plays in it.
Why is that so important? Because technology can drive both positive and negative disruption.
On the positive side, technology enables strategic projects that can drive top-line growth and improve our client experience. These positive disruptions can create competitive advantage for our business.
However, technology can also be a threat. It can create a negative disruption for your business or industry by changing the competitive landscape altogether. Technology is lowering the barriers of entry in what have traditionally been high-barrier industries, creating an opportunity for non-traditional competitors to emerge.
Consider the cloud as an example: You no longer have to own and run a data center in order to be a financial services company. You can rent huge amounts of storage cheaply and process structured and unstructured data to generate predictive insights. In the past, it would have taken years to ramp up to that scale. Another example is continuous delivery. Software is getting faster and cheaper to deploy, making it easier for small, resourceful firms to move forward without being held back by legacy constraints. Business drivers like these can be negative disruptors to your business model, so it’s imperative that the C-Suite understands both the threats and the opportunities they pose.
How do you keep up? One thing we’re doing at Vanguard is planning a multi-day off-site meeting for the C-Suite. Our chairman is championing the event. The agenda? Discuss and explore small, nimble firms as well as large, established tech firms to see what kinds of technologies our colleagues are placing their bets on. The goal is to ensure that we, as the C-Suite, are in tune with the possibilities and the threats presented by technology. Between now and then, we’ve created a series of educational sessions to bring everyone onto an even playing field with respect to recent technology disruptors.
It’s easy to get consumed with day-to-day operations. However, it’s important to take the time to step back and make sure we’re focusing on where up-and-coming technology fits into our enterprise. And it’s vitally important that your organization’s entire executive team is part of these conversations as well.
John T. Marcante is Vanguard’s chief information officer and managing director of Vanguard’s Information Technology Division. Vanguard is the world’s largest mutual fund company with more than $2.6 trillion in global assets under management. Marcante oversees all aspects of Vanguard’s worldwide technology agenda to serve clients and manage investments. Mr. Marcante, with more than 26 years of experience in the business and technology fields, joined Vanguard in 1993. After serving in a number of leadership roles throughout the company, he returned to the IT division in 2012 and was named Vanguard’s chief information officer and managing director. Marcante holds a Bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. from Saint Joseph's University.
